Outlook outage affects users worldwide, appears nearly resolved
July 10 (UPI) -- Outlook email users found themselves without access for several hours Wednesday and Thursday when the service went down.
The problems started at 6:20 p.m. EDT Wednesday, according to Microsoft. The outage affected Outlook.com, mobile apps and desktop programs.
On Thursday afternoon, Microsoft said on X: "Our configuration changes have effectively resolved impact in targeted infrastructure. We're now deploying the changes worldwide to resolve impact for all users."
People using social media posted pictures of the Outlook error page that says "something went wrong."
Microsoft said it is "continuing to apply the configuration changes to fix the underlying problem and completing additional validation efforts to ensure authentication components are properly configured."
The number of users affected is unclear, but the outage appears to have affected users in multiple countries. These include the UK, Australia and Canada. There are more than 400 million Outlook users worldwide.
At 3 p.m. Thursday, Microsoft's official Service Status page said: "The expedited configuration change has reached about 65 percent of affected infrastructure. We're continuing to see a sharp increase in service availability worldwide as the deployment continues. We're closely monitoring progress and anticipate full saturation, by Thursday, July 10, at 7:00 PM UTC. (3 p.m. EDT)"
TechRadar Pro Managing Editor Desiree Athow said: "Microsoft says that its Outlook desktop client, the popular Microsoft email client that is usually bundled with Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365), is also down, which is a bit of a surprise. No other Microsoft products are currently impacted by the downtime which leaves me to believe that it may be something to do with the email middleware itself rather than a more widespread data center infrastructure."
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