Microsoft 365 outage: Outlook email timeout extended to 48 hours

Microsoft 365 has been down for over 16 hours, prompting Microsoft to extend Outlook's email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages from being lost during the outage. Emails sent during the outage are queued rather than deleted, with delivery retried every hour after initial attempts. The extension prevents early bounce-backs, while messages not delivered within 48 hours will return to senders with error code 4.4.7. Incoming emails from Microsoft 365 users are covered by the extension, but those from external providers like Gmail follow their own retry limits. Once service resumes, emails may arrive in bursts, and users should resend only bounced messages to avoid duplicates.