Millions of users worldwide were left without access to their email on Thursday as Microsoft Outlook suffered a significant global outage. The disruption, which began late on July 9 and intensified into the morning of July 10, affected Outlook users across all major platforms, including web, mobile, and desktop applications.
Widespread Impact
The outage impacted both individual and enterprise users, with reports flooding in from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Major metropolitan areas such as New York, London, Sydney, and Dallas were notably affected. Users encountered error messages such as “Something went wrong” and “invalid licenses,” and many were unable to log in, send, or receive emails.
According to Microsoft, the outage was traced to a failure within the mailbox infrastructure, specifically related to authentication components. The company quickly acknowledged the issue on its Service Health dashboard and social media channels, assuring users that engineers were working around the clock to deploy a fix.
“Users may be unable to access their mailbox using any connection methods,” Microsoft stated in an official update.
Business and Personal Disruption
Many businesses reported missed meetings and delayed projects as a result of the downtime. Personal users also expressed frustration at being unable to access important correspondence. While Outlook was the primary service affected, Microsoft confirmed that other products such as Teams, Skype, Word, and Excel remained largely operational during the incident.
Ongoing Response and Resolution
Microsoft’s engineering teams began rolling out a fix in the early hours of July 10, reporting that the restoration process was progressing faster than initially anticipated. However, the company cautioned that full service restoration would take time and advised users to monitor official channels for updates.
This incident follows a series of recent reliability issues for Outlook, including a crash in June and an extended blackout for iOS users in March 2025.
