Microsoft Outage Knocks Out Outlook Email and Disrupts Work Tools

A major outage hit Microsoft's cloud services on Thursday, cutting off Outlook email for people in the United States and around the world. The trouble began around midday Eastern time on November 12, and problems lingered into Friday for some users. At the heart of the outage was Exchange Online, the service that stores Outlook mail and calendars for homes, offices, schools, and medical groups.

The outage reached beyond email, but not everything went dark. Microsoft said features of other services, including Teams and SharePoint, that work with Exchange Online and email were affected, while the parts of those services that do not depend on it kept working, the security news site SecurityWeek reported. Some people who use the Outlook app to read email from other providers also had trouble.

The disruption was widespread. Complaints surged Thursday afternoon across many Microsoft services, the tech news site BleepingComputer reported. Microsoft's service notices did not report any evidence of malicious activity, according to SecurityWeek. Instead, the company said a large number of its email servers began failing their health checks and dropping out of service, which put heavy strain on the servers still running.

To restore service, Microsoft restarted groups of affected servers and rolled back a recent network change, SecurityWeek reported. The company also paused other software rollouts and shifted traffic to healthier routes while it worked, according to BleepingComputer.

For readers at home, the practical advice is simple. If your email or calendar stops working during a big outage like this one, the problem is almost never on your end, and there is nothing you need to buy or install to fix it. Be careful with anyone who calls or emails offering to repair your account. A real company will not phone you at home and ask for your password.

Outages like this are also a good reminder to keep a backup way to reach the people you count on, such as phone numbers written down on paper, in case your email is out for a day.