A negative Outlook: Microsoft scrambles to fix email outage

A Microsoft logo and sign outside the Microsoft Visitor Center are seen at the company's headquarters Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, in Redmond, Wash.

Millions of individuals, organizations, and businesses – including the NPR newsroom - were left without access to Microsoft's Outlook email on Thursday.

Early Friday, after Outlook had been down for more than 12 hours, Microsoft reported "marginal success."

Very little is known so far about what is behind the outage, but Microsoft has attributed it to an "elevated load," or servers becoming overstretched. The tech giant assured users it was doing everything it could to fix the problem.

"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," the company said.

While Microsoft did not say how many users were affected, Microsoft 365 apps have around 430 million users globally. Its communications platform Teams and AI chatbot Copilot were also affected.

The problem has affected users in more than 70 countries, according to Downdetector , which tracks cyber outages. Countries from the U.S. to South Africa to India and New Zealand were affected.

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