Microsoft Outlook outage persists as global fix falls short

Microsoft's efforts to fix a global Outlook outage are not working "as expected," the company said early Friday, as users worldwide continued experiencing email and connectivity issues. The disruption, attributed to "high load" on Microsoft's infrastructure, affected products including Outlook, Teams, and AI assistant Copilot across 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector. Microsoft said it is exploring alternative solutions and has suspended deployments while restarting affected servers. Outage reports peaked at around 130,000 in the US shortly after 1pm ET Thursday, later dropping to about 37,000 by 6pm ET. The company initially investigated reports in the Americas before confirming the issue affected Microsoft 365 connectivity globally.