Struggling to check your email today? You're not alone.
Outlook is experiencing an outage globally, leaving users unable to send or receive emails. The Microsoft-owned email service is one of the most widely used on the planet, with an estimated 400 million active users worldwide. However, an unknown issue has left Outlook users in the UK unable to refresh their inbox.
More than 300 people are reporting problems with the email service every minute, data shows. The issues with Outlook started around 5am in the UK. Microsoft has promised to an update to Outlook users at 10.30am on July 10.
In its last update, Microsoft confirmed: "Our deployment of the fix is progressing quicker than anticipated and we expect impact to gradually mitigate as it progresses. We believe the issue will be resolved by our next update time."
Down Detector UK has recorded a dramatic spike in reported issues with the service across the UK. There doesn't seem to be a single platform that's more impact than any other
DOWN DETECTOR
Microsoft has confirmed the widespread problem. In an update to its server status dashboard, it writes: "Users may be unable to access their mailbox using any connection methods."
According to Microsoft, the Outlook experiences most likely impacted by the ongoing problems include:
- Outlook.com
- Outlook mobile app on iOS and Android
- Outlook desktop application
While some Outlook subscribers have been struck with a pop-up reading "connection to server failed", others are reporting seeing Error 500 and Error 401 codes when they try to load-up their inbox on devices and browsers.
According to the independent web service Down Detector, which tracks outages based on reports across social media, those impacted by the outage are seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from a range of devices.
Outlook is Microsoft’s all-in-one email, calendar, and task management app, tightly integrated within the Microsoft 365 suite. Outlook.com email addresses are available for free, but unlocking its premium features will require a standalone purchase or in-app upgrades. Outlook is bundled within a Microsoft 365 subscription—offering the fully-featured experience across all devices, cloud storage with OneDrive, and ongoing updates.
For this reason, Down Detector tracks outages across Microsoft 365 services — not just the email service.
On X, formerly Twitter, users have bemoaned the Outlook problems, which have prevented them from starting work, planning events on their Outlook calendar, or replying to critical messages.
This shift to a monthly subscription model reflects Microsoft’s broader move toward SaaS, or Software as a Service — a cloud-based model where subscribers pay to access applications over the internet with new features added all of the time, rather than installing and maintaining applications locally on devices.
The latest outage follows a range of issues that've plagued Outlook in recent months. Starting in June 2024, an incident limited to the Asia‑Pacific region knocked out Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive for some 160,000 subscribers for several hours, which Microsoft later traced to a misrouted configuration and resolved with incremental routing fixes.
That November, there was a global outage that impacted all Microsoft 365 services — leaving more than 5,300 people reporting issues on DownDetector; Microsoft said a recent change had destabilised Exchange Online and Teams calendars, and it deployed targeted machine restarts within hours to restore normal operations.
On March 1, 2025, an erroneous code update triggered Outlook and broader Microsoft 365 service failures, generating over 35,000 outage reports; Microsoft publicly acknowledged the faulty release, reverted the change and restored service later that evening.