Technology 2 min read By Lauren Baxter
Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 Hit by Widespread Sign-In Outage in North America
Microsoft is investigating a widespread outage of Outlook and Microsoft 365 that has left users in North America without access to email, putting business communications at risk.
Microsoft is investigating a widespread outage affecting Outlook and Microsoft 365, which has left some users unable to access their email. The outage was reported on Thursday and has affected communications for companies across several industries, leaving many organizations with paralyzed business correspondence.
The company acknowledged the problem through posts on its social media accounts. The first message appeared at around 12:54 p.m. Eastern Time. Users in North America, and reportedly in other regions as well, complained that they could not sign in to their mailboxes. According to the posts, the issues concern access to mailboxes in Exchange Online specifically, and the failure appears regardless of the connection method used in the Americas.
It was also reported that the outage affects not only the Microsoft 365 suite but also the standalone Outlook service. This means that users who work with the application separately from the office suite have also lost the ability to send and receive emails. Initially, the company did not provide an estimated time for restoring service, so organizations were forced to wait without a clear forecast.
The cause of the outage has not been confirmed at the time of these reports. The scale of the problem and the exact duration of the disruption also remain unknown. For companies that rely every day on email as their primary channel of communication with clients, partners, and their own teams, even a temporary interruption can lead to work delays and missed business contacts.
Incidents like this show how heavily modern businesses depend on cloud services from a single platform. When access to email stops, the impact extends beyond exchanging messages to calendars, shared documents, and other processes tied to Microsoft 365 accounts. Until the company announces a recovery, users can follow official updates on its social media accounts.
Source: deadline.com
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