Major outage hits Microsoft Outlook; Singapore users affected

WASHINGTON – Microsoft Outlook suffered a major outage on Nov 12, with tens of thousands of users struggling to access their email as the company said it was working “aggressively” to reduce the impact.Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports “in the Americas”, but later said it had “confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”.Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.According to outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (2am on Nov 13, Singapore time).Reports of outages have since declined, with about 60,000 users reporting experiencing issues with Outlook as of 3pm Eastern Time.As at about 5.45am, there were 90 reports from Singapore.“We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” the company wrote on X.“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” it said.“We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”Thousands of users also reported issues accessing Microsoft Teams, according to Downdetector. AFP