Microsoft Outlook Down: Thousands Hit by Email Outage Amid Authentication Issue

Microsoft's Outlook service experienced a major outage on August 31, affecting thousands of users across the US. The issue began around 8 a.m. PT, with Downdetector recording over 6,000 reports of problems with Outlook by 8:17 a.m. PT.

Users reported difficulties accessing their accounts, sending and receiving emails, and opening messages in both the website and app versions of Outlook. Microsoft acknowledged the disruption on its official Microsoft 365 Status account, saying it had identified an issue with an authentication component contributing to the problem.

The company confirmed that engineers were working on a remediation strategy and testing it on a portion of its infrastructure. Once successful, the fix would be rolled out more broadly to affected accounts.