London/Washington: Millions of Microsoft users around the world were affected Thursday morning as Outlook and Hotmail email services experienced a significant outage, with users reporting login failures and slow access across web, mobile, and desktop platforms.
The issue, which began late Wednesday evening and intensified Thursday morning, saw a surge in complaints on DownDetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions. Reports peaked at over 2,500 incidents by 10:35 a.m. ET, with 61% of users citing login issues and 34% pointing to server connection failures.
Microsoft confirmed the disruption on its Office service health dashboard, stating that it was actively investigating and working to resolve the problem. A subsequent update from the company said, “We’ve determined the cause of the issue and have deployed a fix. We’re closely monitoring its deployment and expect the issue to gradually resolve as deployment progresses.”
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Outlook, Hotmail Login Issues Spark Global Frustration
The outage impacted a broad range of users across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, among other regions. Microsoft Outlook, which has more than 400 million users globally, is used by individuals, enterprises, and institutions as a primary communication platform.
Affected users reported being logged out of their accounts or seeing an error indicating they did not have a valid license to use Outlook. Others were able to log in but faced slow performance or incomplete loading of inboxes and folders. Many also took to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to express frustration and seek updates using hashtags like #OutlookDown and #HotmailDown.
Not the First Disruption
This is the latest in a series of recent Microsoft service outages. In November 2024, Outlook and Microsoft Teams users were affected by connectivity issues related to Exchange Online. In July 2024, a global tech disruption triggered by a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike took down Microsoft Windows systems, halting operations across hospitals, airlines, and government services.
While some users speculated Thursday’s incident may be cyber-related, Microsoft has not attributed the issue to any form of malicious activity. The company has a history of service disruptions linked to internal configuration errors or faulty updates, and experts believe this may again be the case.
Is Outlook Down Right Now? Here’s What We Know
- Issue start time: ~7:35 p.m. ET, July 9
- Peak reports: 2,585 issues logged on DownDetector by 10:35 a.m. ET, July 10
- Main problems: Login failure (61%), server connection (34%)
- Affected services: Outlook.com, Hotmail, Outlook Mobile, and Outlook desktop client
- Status: Fix deployed, gradual recovery underway
Microsoft has advised users to stay updated via the Office 365 status page and has not announced any compensation or service credit related to the outage.
