Microsoft Outlook Down: Thousands Affected by Unexplained Outage
Microsoft Outlook experienced an outage on August 31, 2026, leaving thousands of users unable to access their email accounts. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks real-time outages, there were over 5,970 reports made by 9:29 a.m. that Outlook was down. By 3:05 p.m., the number of reports had decreased to 2,730.
Chico State's Public Relations Director Andrew Staples said the university couldn't do anything about the outage since it's an internal issue with Microsoft. Gio Gnech, a student working in Chico State's IT department, stated that the department doesn't have an estimated time for when Outlook will be usable again, but it could take a few days.
The Canvas Infrastructure Support Team confirmed that Microsoft being down might affect Canvas messages being sent to school Outlook inboxes. However, messages would still go through Canvas. At 3:02 p.m., Microsoft 365 Status updated X with a statement saying, 'we're continuing to review recent changes to the service to definitively confirm the source of the problem.'