Global Microsoft Outlook Email outage!

[canamjhb]

I've spent the last hour and a half trying to get my Microsoft Outlook email open. Tried lots of things and different ways. Just saw a caption banner on my TV advising that the system is down nation-wide. Sure wish there was a better way to notify us so us old guys don't spend eternity chasing our tails. I do have a backup secondary gmail account but there was nothing on there about the Outlook problem.

 

[UtahPete]

I've spent the last hour and a half trying to get my Microsoft Outlook email open. Tried lots of things and different ways. Just saw a caption banner on my TV advising that the system is down nation-wide. Sure wish there was a better way to notify us so us old guys don't spend eternity chasing our tails. I do have a backup secondary gmail account but there was nothing on there about the Outlook problem.

Might be a virus. Be careful.

 

[Peter Aawen]

Might be a virus. Be careful.

It's not a virus, it's a Global Outage affecting several Microsoft Suite platforms, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot.

There's a Service Health Status notice right at the bottom of the Microsoft 365 dropdown, and it's posted there only because Microsoft 365 Administrators may be unable to access the Admin center to get Service Health info, but it's a World Wide Major Outage caused by 'a large number of servers being made unexpectedly unavailable', altho Microsoft is now saying 'there are now a subset of servers back online and they are working to apply those changes more broadly', so some users may be getting access back to their emails.

 

[Bfromla]

All that spam mail fermented & servers puked

 

[Little Blue]

It is just the way the internet systems work. Way too many hackers
trying to mess up anything used for good. I try to use the internet
as little as possible. Just don't trust this system anymore. Now AI is
Not your friend. Just wanted to let everyone know.

 

[RangerRick]

It's not a virus, it's a Global Outage affecting several Microsoft Suite platforms, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot.

There's a Service Health Status notice right at the bottom of the Microsoft 365 dropdown, and it's posted there only because Microsoft 365 Administrators may be unable to access the Admin center to get Service Health info, but it's a World Wide Major Outage caused by 'a large number of servers being made unexpectedly unavailable', altho Microsoft is now saying 'there are now a subset of servers back online and they are working to apply those changes more broadly', so some users may be getting access back to their emails.

I use Fastmail, based in your neck of the woods Never have had an issue with them for over 6 years.

 

[pegasus1300]

My wife is trying to transfer our tickets for the BYU/Baylor game and got caught in that mess. Hope it clears soon.

 

[UtahPete]

It is just the way the internet systems work. Way too many hackers
trying to mess up anything used for good. I try to use the internet
as little as possible. Just don't trust this system anymore. Now AI is
Not your friend. Just wanted to let everyone know.

That has not been my experience.

I didn't realize there were so many people using Outlook still. It became more of a tool for organizational teams long ago, I thought.

 

[JayBros]

I began seeing some unusual alerts last evening and heard on the news this morning that the problem involves Microsoft 365 and, in my case Outlook 365. I received a lot of email messages overnight, but early this morning, about 0720 or so, I couldn't send email, and I also got a message when trying to save Word and Excel documents that said the program had saved the document, but couldn't upload it because the servers were busy. Sometimes progress can bite us in the backside.

 

[canamjhb]

Just checked my service and it's up and running. Seems to be even faster than I remember......

 

[Little Blue]

TV News People said Microsoft was not hacked. They are saying that Microsoft is doing some updates. I mean, what would you expect them to say?!

It is interesting that the bugs started on Wednesday afternoon, and they were still fixing bugs on Friday the 13th. Just tell us the truth and not a story you want you want us to believe. I understand that this type of technology will have some issues from time to time.

Have a Blessed Day.

 

[UtahPete]

• Timeline: The disruption began around noon ET on Thursday, November 12, 2026, and affected users across 74 countries.
• Services Impacted: Outlook email, Teams meetings and chat, SharePoint, OneDrive, and the Copilot AI assistant went dark or experienced severe loading failures for hundreds of millions of users.
• Cause: Microsoft confirmed the crash was a technical issue—not a cyberattack or AI-related agent failure—stemming from an issue during a network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change.
• Resolution: Gradual stabilization and recovery took place through Friday, with Microsoft declaring full restoration by early Saturday morning (around 1 a.m. ET) while continuing to monitor email message backlogs.
• Broader Impact: The outage hit businesses, schools, government offices, hospitals, and emergency services worldwide, though Microsoft clarified it was unrelated to a separate Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) telecommunications and ground-stop event.

 

[BajaRon]

It is interesting that both Microsoft and FAA functions went down at roughly the same time. Just saying...

(Added Two extraordinarily uncommon, and extremely critical failures. Me thinks this might cause Shirlock Holmes to utter;
'The Game is Afoot, Watson!'.

 

[JayBros]

I heard last evening on some national news station the FAA is in the process of replacing old copper wire with fiber optic cable. This afternoon when I returned from a ride, I turned on my computer and started Excel as the program opened with a short note that said "Updating Microsoft 365" although my outlook functioned normally from about 10:30 EST throughout the remainder of the day.

 

[Deanna777]

Well, here in Vermont they are saying that FAA lifted its ground stop order just after 7:30 PM (EST) on Friday, after halting every flight in and out of the U.S. about 4 hours earlier. The quote from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the outages were caused by an "incredibly Old" air traffic control system that was overwhelmed with data.

There were 3,500 air planes in the sky at the time of the ground stoppage. Duffy said that getting air traffic back to normal will be slow. Which includes a local airport (here in the State of Vermont).

After more than four hours, the FAA lifted the order. Many passengers at the airport are rebooking on flights later this weekend.

Several flights got close to departing before the stoppage, but were forced to stop just before takeoff.

A Traveler said "The next flight to DC, they boarded, and then they had to un-board all those people just as we're about to get on".

The next flights are scheduled to depart the local airport Saturday morning.
Friday's ground stoppage could mean further delays.

Deanna