Microsoft working to fix Outlook email issues

Microsoft has announced its efforts to address ongoing technical difficulties impacting users' ability to send and receive emails via its Outlook application. The disruptions surfaced during peak business hours in the U.S., prompting a surge of complaints on social media as schools, government agencies, and businesses faced the fallout of the outage. The Outlook application is a vital component of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, and the issues have raised significant concern among its users. At 2:37 p.m. ET, Microsoft shared via an X post that it was investigating a problem that was affecting the service. The company noted that users might encounter a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error when trying to send or receive emails. Further complications were reported as users experienced sluggish performance or complete failures when searching in the OneDrive cloud storage and SharePoint Online collaboration services, according to updates on the company's online dashboard. Just before 3:17 p.m. ET, Microsoft provided another update, revealing that a segment of the service infrastructure in North America was mishandling traffic, and they were actively working to resolve the issue. Last July, a similar outage left Outlook users in the lurch for over 21 hours.