Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts email services for thousands

Thousands of Microsoft Outlook users experienced significant disruptions to their email services on Monday, August 31, 2026, with widespread reports of failures in sending and receiving messages, accessing the web platform, and using the Outlook application. The outage, which began during the morning hours in North America, prompted Microsoft to acknowledge the issue and initiate recovery efforts.

Problems were first reported on crowdsourced outage tracking websites around 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time, with user reports peaking at approximately 6,000 around 9:30 a.m. The issues affected both the Outlook desktop app and the web-based Outlook on the Web (OWA), with users reporting symptoms including authentication errors, delays in message delivery, failures to send or receive emails, and difficulties accessing mailboxes or subfolders. Some users stated they could not open the application at all, while others encountered server errors when trying to load the web interface.

Microsoft confirmed the outage in a post on X, stating that users were experiencing degraded functionality with Exchange Online, the cloud-based platform for business email, calendar, and contacts. The company said it...