If you’ve been trying to open Outlook and wondering why your emails aren’t loading, you’re definitely not the only one.
Microsoft is dealing with a massive worldwide outage, leaving thousands of people unable to access their emails, join meetings or use some of the company’s most popular workplace tools.
The problems began on Thursday, November 12, and continued into Friday, affecting Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 and the AI assistant Copilot.
And the scale is pretty serious.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems were recorded in the United States alone at the peak of the disruption.
Users reported being unable to send or receive emails, open their inboxes and access other Microsoft services.
The outage has affected businesses, schools and even government operations across different countries.
So, what actually happened?
Microsoft says parts of its infrastructure experienced unusually high loads, while some servers became unresponsive.
The company attempted to restart affected systems and redirect traffic, but some servers stopped working again when users returned.
And no, there’s currently no evidence that the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
Microsoft has been working on restoring services, reporting some progress while warning that the recovery process is taking longer than expected.
The situation also shows how dependent we’ve become on a handful of digital platforms.
When one major service goes down, millions of people’s daily routines can suddenly be interrupted.
For students waiting on important emails and employees trying to get through their workday, the disruption is more than a minor inconvenience.
Although, somewhere out there, someone is definitely enjoying the excuse not to answer their emails today.
