Microsoft Outlook outage hits thousands of users across 74 countries
Microsoft suffered a major global outage of its Outlook email service on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access their emails. The company said it was working "relentlessly" to resolve the issue. The outage affected Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, according to Downdetector. Microsoft confirmed the problem could impact Microsoft 365 connections for all users worldwide and paused deployments while restarting affected servers. The disruption also affected AI assistants like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT that 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 due to disrupted email and voice communications.