Microsoft investigates Outlook outage

Microsoft said it is investigating a reported outage with its Microsoft Outlook email service after many users experienced issues sending emails, searching emails or receiving emails overnight and into Tuesday morning.

Microsoft’s service status page indicated many users in North America were affected by the outage and that it also impacted the calendar function and Microsoft Teams. At around 11 p.m. Monday, more than 2,000 users reported issues with Microsoft Outlook, according to Downdetector, which is a website that tracks user reports of online service outages.

Microsoft Service tweeted early Tuesday morning that a “recent change” contributed to the email service outage and that it was working on “potential solutions to restore availability of the service.”

Microsoft said on its service page that it started to see “gradual recovery” in the Microsoft Outlook programs Tuesday morning, saying it “applied mitigation throughout the affected infrastructure” to address the issues.

Microsoft Service tweeted at about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday that restoring service was almost complete.

“Availability is at 99.9%, with full restoration almost complete. We’re continuing to monitor the environment to ensure full recovery,” the tweet reads.

Microsoft announced last month that it plans to lay off 10,000 employees by the end of the third quarter, a move that many other tech companies have taken at the start of 2023.

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill at about 12:30 p.m. that the outage “has been resolved.”

Updated at 12:56 p.m.