Microsoft Outlook Outage Cuts Email at Courts, Cities and Hospitals

Microsoft Outlook users began losing access to their online mailboxes shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday, when Microsoft said on social media that it was investigating reports of problems, according to ABC News. The outage also reached other Microsoft applications and disrupted email at city governments, courts, hospital networks and universities in the United States and abroad.

By Friday morning Microsoft said service was stabilizing and apologized. Some organizations reported that access had only partly come back, and some users saw unread messages arrive slowly as inboxes recovered.

Who lost email and other services

ABC News tallied notices from a long list of affected institutions. Some posted alerts on Thursday, others on Friday morning.

• The city of Austin, Texas, said on X on Thursday that its employees could not send or receive email.
• Baltimore said Friday on its website that city services were running normally but that a global Microsoft outage was delaying city email.
• New York City’s Emergency Management Department told residents that email to city agencies and online city services that depend on Microsoft systems could be delayed or temporarily disrupted.
• Unity Health Toronto, a Canadian hospital network, said some of its email services were disrupted on Thursday and that patient and resident care was not affected.
• The United Kingdom’s National Health Service said on X on Friday that staff were working to keep critical services and appointments going for patients.
• The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom said Friday it was not receiving emails, while its Portal and contact forms still worked.
• Cambridge University said the outage hit email, calendars and SharePoint, and Kean University in New Jersey warned on Thursday of problems with university email.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, said on Thursday that some Claude services were affected. On Friday it reported seeing “signs of recovery.”

What Microsoft said caused the outage

Microsoft said the problem was technical and had nothing to do with a cyberattack or with AI agents. In the company’s account, the fault started during an earlier network capacity upgrade and surfaced after a more recent network change. Microsoft said it had fixed the underlying issue and was still restoring service to the remaining customers and regions.

Earlier on Friday, the company described “early stabilization and capacity improvements” as its recovery work continued.

What it means for people still waiting on email

Recovery has been uneven. Some organizations said Microsoft access was back only in part on Friday, and Microsoft said it was still bringing service back to some customers and regions. Messages sent during the outage may show up late as mailboxes catch up.

Several public bodies pointed people to other ways in while email was down. The UK Supreme Court said its Portal and contact forms were working normally. New York City warned that replies from city agencies could be slower than usual. If Outlook still fails to load, our guide on checking Microsoft service health when Outlook is not working covers the basic checks.

Microsoft has not given a time for full restoration.

Source: ABC News