Is Outlook down? Possible Microsoft outage locks down email inboxes.

Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 1:45 p.m. ET — Microsoft initially described the issue as primiarily affecting mailboxes "in the Americas." However, in an update posted to X, the company acknowledged other services and locations were also affected."While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543." The company added, "a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors."Thousands of Microsoft Outlook users reported an outage on Thursday afternoon, with user error reports for Microsoft products spiking sharply. The platform DownDetector showed error reports spiking around 12:30 p.m. ET. By 1:12 p.m. ET, the service had received more than 130,000 reports, indicating serious problems with the popular email service. Virtually all Microsoft services showed elevated error reports, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft Teams. The best tech deal this week The Apple iPhone 18 Pro is free right now with T-Mobile Products available for purchase through affiliate links. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. Mashable Light Speed Credit: Screenshot courtesy of DownDetector At this time, it's not clear if those reports are related to an Outlook outage or indicate that these services are also down.However, there are signs of a more widespread problem. Case in point: The Microsoft service status page was not loading for Mashable reporters, as of this writing.However, the Microsoft 365 Status account on X posted a message acknowledging an outage at 12:54 p.m. ET: "We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas." This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Outlook previously experienced a widespread outage in August. At the time, the company cited a "misconfiguration issue that prevented authentication components from deploying correctly.This is a developing story...