Microsoft Outlook hit with hours-long outage

Microsoft's Outlook email service experienced a significant outage that lasted for several hours on Wednesday and Thursday. Users took to social media platforms to express their frustrations regarding their inability to access their email accounts. The disruption began at approximately 6:20 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, as indicated by the dashboard maintained by Microsoft. The outage affected not only Outlook.com but also its mobile applications and desktop versions, leaving many users without their virtual mailboxes. By 12:21 p.m. ET on Thursday, the Microsoft 365 Status account announced that a solution was being rolled out. "Our configuration changes have effectively resolved impact in targeted infrastructure. We're now deploying the changes worldwide to resolve impact for all users," Microsoft communicated in a post on X. The company's status page indicated that most users experiencing issues would see improvements within two hours, while the team continued to monitor the situation closely. As reports of the service returning to normal flooded in, many users shared screenshots showcasing error messages that read, "something went wrong." With hundreds of millions of active users relying on Outlook, the email service holds substantial importance, even though Apple and Google's email platforms are currently more favored, according to analytics from Litmus.