Microsoft Outlook outage affects email traffic worldwide

A widespread outage at Microsoft affected the email traffic of millions of users worldwide on Monday evening. Both corporate customers of Microsoft 365 and private users of the Outlook email service are affected.

As the US software company confirmed on its official status pages in the evening, there are significant problems with logging in and receiving and sending emails. Many users also reported that mailboxes were no longer synchronized and the application was freezing.

Cloud infrastructure failures

According to Microsoft, the cause lies in the Exchange Online cloud infrastructure. An error in a central authentication and connection component prevents proper access to the mail servers. The incident is listed under the internal identifier EX1464935. The company's technicians say they have initiated countermeasures and are currently gradually rolling out an update on the affected servers in order to restore services.

Users should not make any changes

On fault portals such as Downdetector, the number of complaints quickly rose to tens of thousands. IT experts advise affected users not to change local settings on the computer or reinstall the software, as the error is purely server-side. In addition, emails remaining in your outbox should not be sent manually repeatedly in order to avoid multiple deliveries later.