Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts email for thousands across 74 countries

A major Microsoft Outlook outage has left tens of thousands of users worldwide unable to access their email, with the company working to resolve the issue. The outage affected Microsoft products across 74 countries and territories, including the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Microsoft confirmed the problem could impact Microsoft 365 connections globally and paused deployments while restarting affected servers. The disruption also affected AI assistants like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT, which rely on Microsoft accounts. In the US, about 130,000 users reported issues, and the University of Iowa hospital network asked patients to use its online portal.