Microsoft Outlook suffers global outage

• A Microsoft Outlook outage affected thousands of users’ email access on Saturday.
• The outage led to over 35,000 complaints on Downdetector.
• Microsoft said it identified the cause, reverted the code, and services are now recovering.

Thousands of people were left without access to their email on Saturday after Microsoft Outlook suffered an apparent outage.

Over 35,000 complaints were posted to Downdetector, a website for reporting technical issues.

Users also posted to social media to complain and warn others.

“Had to change my password 3 times until I checked on #x that #outlook is down. Wth @Microsoft,” one X user wrote.

The X account for Microsoft 365, which includes several Microsoft programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel, posted that the company had identified a potential cause of the outage and “reverted the suspected code to alleviate impact.”

Microsoft said in a following post that the majority of the services affected by the outage were recovering after the fix, but that developers will “keep monitoring until the impact has been resolved.”

Several tech companies have seen outages over the last year. Most recently, the popular workplace communication platform Slack went dark for several hours on Wednesday.

One of the largest global tech outages in history occurred in June 2024. A Microsoft Windows update at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike grounded flights worldwide and caused chaos at hospitals, which couldn’t access patient records and appointment systems.

Microsoft did not immediately return a request for comment from Business Insider.