Microsoft Outlook down? Email problems hit users across the world - here's what we know

If you're had trouble logging on to Microsoft Outlook this morning, you're not alone.

A major outage across the company's platform appears to be taking place, with issues affecting users across the world.

The outage is still ongoing - here's all our updates as they happen.

2026-04-27T15:55:37.478Z

Interestingly, the outage does seem limited to just Microsoft Outlook, suggesting it is an issue directly relating to the email program.

Sadly this means Microsoft Teams is still running - so you can't escape your morning stand-up meetings that easy.

2026-04-27T15:50:02.721Z

Microsoft has updated its slightly vague and helpless message from earlier, with a slightly more confident-sounding post.

"We’re seeing specific errors related to authentication key failures," it said. "We’re working to determine the underlying cause in order to determine our next mitigation steps."

2026-04-27T15:41:48.458Z

While that continues, outage reports continue to rise on DownDetector - although things are levelling off slightly.

This outage comes as many on the West Coast of the US are logging in to work first thing on Monday morning - so if that's you, be prepared for a potentially slightly delayed work day!

2026-04-27T15:35:57.420Z

We have to say the latest update from Microsoft doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

"We've completed reverting the recently introduced change, however, this has not produced any relief," the company noted on its service health status page.

"We're continuing to investigate the unexpected increase in error rates affecting two separate error scenarios to identify any potential root cause which may be responsible for this. Additionally, we're closely monitoring service telemetry to discover any other potential actions, or mitigation steps."

2026-04-27T15:27:42.839Z

The official Azure status page has confirmed there is an issue, and it is being investigated.

Users "may experience intermittent issues signing in to Outlook.com", the company says, as well as possibly seeing an "experience intermittent sign‑in failures, including “too many requests” errors or unexpected sign‑outs. Additionally, impacted users may include, but are not limited to, iOS users."

2026-04-27T15:25:44.050Z

As you can see - that's quite the spike in outage reports on DownDetector for Microsoft Outlook...

Welcome to our coverage of this outage - not long ago, we saw huge spikes in reports on outage tracker DownDetector, with Microsoft Outlook affected.