Microsoft's Outlook outage persists worldwide after cloud email disruption

A worldwide outage of Microsoft's cloud-based email service Outlook has persisted since Thursday evening, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access their emails. The disruption has affected a range of Microsoft services, including calendar-dependent tasks in Teams and the Copilot AI assistant for business customers. Downdetector reported outages across 74 countries, with nearly 130,000 Outlook issues logged by 7:00 PM CET, though reports had dropped to around 37,000 by midnight. Microsoft attributed the problem to increased load on infrastructure in multiple regions and said it was redirecting traffic from affected servers. The company reported "limited improvement" but warned servers could hang again once traffic reached them. This follows a similar multi-hour outage of Microsoft's email services in late August, which was also caused by a cloud infrastructure issue.