Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts email for tens of thousands globally

A major Microsoft Outlook outage on Thursday left tens of thousands of users unable to access their email, with the company saying it was working "relentlessly" to resolve the issue. The disruption affected Microsoft 365 services globally. Microsoft initially investigated reports of outages in the Americas before confirming the problem could impact user connections to Microsoft 365 worldwide. Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 user reports of issues shortly after 18:00 GMT, with about 50,000 still reporting problems over three hours later. The company paused deployments, offloaded affected infrastructure, and restarted servers to restore service. The outage also disrupted AI assistants like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT, which rely on Microsoft accounts, and forced the University of Iowa hospital network to direct patients to its online portal.