Outlook down: thousands locked out of email on Thursday evening

The symptoms are similar everywhere: the app won't load, Outlook on the web stays blank, and the mailbox shows as "disconnected", with nothing sent or received. The mobile app, the web version and work mailboxes all seem to be hit.

At the start of the outage, Microsoft's official status page showed no incident. That's not unusual. The company often takes a while to admit a problem, and it first details it to IT administrators in the Microsoft 365 admin center. No cause is known yet. The culprit could be Exchange Online, Microsoft's online mail server that runs Outlook.com and business mailboxes. When it stumbles, the app is an empty shell on any device.

What to do when Outlook is down

Don't bother reinstalling the app or changing your password. If the fault is on Microsoft's servers, neither will help. You can open Outlook on the web in a browser, which at least tells you whether only the app is stuck or the whole service. To follow progress, Microsoft's status dashboard and the Microsoft 365 Status account on X are the two official sources.

Not the first Outlook outage this year

On 22 January, Outlook went down along with other Microsoft 365 services. At the end of April, an outage of more than ten hours blocked sign-ins to Outlook.com because of a configuration change Microsoft had to roll back. Exchange Online failed again on 2 June and on 31 August, the second time because of a configuration problem in the authentication system, according to Microsoft.