Is Microsoft Outlook down?

Which Outlook is giving you trouble?

• Work or school emailYou sign in with your company address. That's Microsoft 365. Microsoft posts its problems at status.cloud.microsoft, and whoever runs your Microsoft 365 account sees the details under Health, then Service health.
• Outlook.com or HotmailMicrosoft's personal email, including Live and MSN addresses. It runs apart from work email, so one can be fine while the other is down.
• The Outlook appIf your mail works in a web browser and not in the app on your computer, the problem is the app or the computer, not Microsoft.

Is it just you? Four checks that take a minute

1. Open outlook.office.com in a web browser (outlook.live.com for personal email). If your mail works there, Microsoft is fine and the problem is the app on your computer.
2. Ask one coworker. If their email works and yours doesn't, it's your account, your password or your computer.
3. Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and open Outlook on cellular. If it works there, look at the office internet.
4. Watch for a sign-in box that keeps coming back. Outside an outage, that points to a password or sign-in problem on your account. During one, it's the outage, so don't reset your password: a new one won't fix it, and every phone and computer on that account will ask for it again.

Microsoft is down. Now what?

• Tell everyone once, so nobody spends the morning restarting their computer.
• Call anyone waiting on an email reply from you today.
• Don't reinstall Outlook, rebuild your profile or reset passwords. None of it fixes a Microsoft outage, and all of it has to be undone later.
• Mail you send from the Outlook app usually waits in the Outbox and goes out when service is back. Check the Outbox afterward.
• Mail people send you is usually delivered late rather than lost, because the sending servers keep trying. If something can't wait, pick up the phone.
• Microsoft's status posts say when the next update is due. Check back then instead of every five minutes.

If you run your company's Microsoft 365 account

Recent Microsoft 365 outages

• November 12, 2026Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 services failed for many users. Microsoft pointed to "elevated load" on its infrastructure across regions, paused deployments and moved traffic. Source: CNET
• April 27 and 28, 2026Outlook sign-in failures that carried into a second day. Source: CNET

Questions people ask

• Is Outlook down right now?

  The check at the top of this page answers that. It reads Microsoft's own status page, tests whether Outlook's servers answer, and tests your own connection when you load the page. Each answer shows when it was checked.

• Is there a nationwide Outlook outage?

  When there is, Microsoft posts it at status.cloud.microsoft, and the first row of the check above shows it. Some outages hit one region before others, so a coworker in another state may be fine.

• Why is Microsoft Outlook not working?

  If Microsoft isn't reporting a problem, it's usually your password or sign-in, the Outlook app, your computer's connection or a full mailbox. The four checks above sort out which.

• Is Outlook down or is it just me?

  Look at the last row of the check above. If Outlook answers from our servers but not from your connection, it's your network or your computer.

• How do I report an Outlook outage?

  With a work or school account, whoever runs your Microsoft 365 account can open a support request from the Microsoft 365 admin center. For personal Outlook.com email, use Help in Outlook on the web.

• Is Microsoft Teams down too?

  Teams and Outlook share some of Microsoft's systems, so a big outage can hit both, like the one on November 12, 2026. Microsoft's status post lists every service affected.