Microsoft outage: Are emails sent during the disruption lost?

Microsoft's global outage disrupted Outlook email services, but messages sent during the disruption are not permanently lost. Emails are either delayed in retry queues or returned with failure notices, depending on where the delivery process stalled. The outage began around 1pm ET, with nearly 130,000 complaints reported, affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers primarily. Microsoft re-routed traffic and rebooted servers to restore services. Emails stuck in the Outbox require manual resending, while delayed messages are retried for up to 24 hours before a bounce-back notice. External senders' providers typically retry delivery for 24-72 hours. Users can check status via Outlook on the web, while administrators can use Microsoft's Message Trace tool, which retains data for 90 days.