Microsoft Investigates Ongoing Exchange Online, Outlook Outage

Microsoft is investigating an ongoing outage impacting Microsoft 365 services after customers have reported experiencing issues while trying to sign into, access, and receive emails on the outlook.com portal and via Exchange Online.

“We’re investigating an issue with users accessing or experiencing degraded functionality when using Exchange Online and http://outlook.com services,” Microsoft said in a tweet via the company’s official Twitter account for updates on Microsoft 365 services.

Admins were also told that they could find more information regarding these ongoing problems in the admin center under EX401976 and OL401977.

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“We suspect there may be unexpected network drops which are contributing to the degraded experience and are reviewing diagnostic logs to understand why,” the company added.

While Redmond did not reveal the scale of the issue, thousands of reports have been submitted in the past 24 hours on DownDetector by Outlook and Exchange Online users who have either been unable or experienced difficulties when trying to log in or email.

Microsoft also acknowledged that Microsoft 365 customers might be unable to access the outlook.com web portal or some of its features in an update to the service health status page.

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“Users may be unable to access or use outlook.com services or features. We’re reviewing diagnostic information and support case data to understand the cause and establish a fix,” Microsoft explained.

“We’re investigating a potential issue and checking for impact to your organization. We’ll provide an update within 30 minutes.”

In June, another Microsoft 365 outage affected customers worldwide trying to access Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online.

Redmond addressed the issue by rerouting traffic to an alternate, healthy, traffic management infrastructure and via targeted infrastructure restarts to restore service access and functionality.

Update July 1, 12:38 EDT: Microsoft says it fixed the issue that caused this outage.

“We identified a section of our network infrastructure that was performing below acceptable thresholds. We’ve rerouted connections to alternate infrastructure and that confirmed the issue is resolved,” Redmond tweeted.