Outlook outage disrupts logins for users

A 'recently introduced change' may have triggered the issue

Workers attempting to access email accounts on Microsoft Outlook experienced widespread disruption on Monday, with users reporting sign-in failures, unexpected logouts and error messages.

The issue appeared to affect customers globally, particularly those using Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise services.

Many users said they were unable to access their inboxes at the start of the working day, prompting frustration and a surge in complaints online.

On its official service status channels, Microsoft acknowledged the problem, stating that some customers were encountering intermittent login failures, including "too many requests" errors.

"We've discovered some users may experience intermittent sign‑in failures, including 'too many requests' errors, or unexpected sign‑outs. We're analysing service telemetry further to identify any potential next steps and mitigation actions," it said.

Reports of disruption began early in the morning, with outage-monitoring platform DownDetector recording a sharp increase in complaints from around 05:00 Eastern Time.

The number of reports rose further as workers in the United States began their workweek.

By mid-morning, Microsoft confirmed the issue was ongoing and described it as "service degradation" – a term typically used when a system remains online but is not functioning reliably for users.

In a later update, the company said it had identified an unexpected increase in error rates affecting two separate error scenarios, which it believed were contributing to the disruption.

"We suspect this may be contributing to creating impact, and we're conducting additional analysis to confirm this," the company said.

Microsoft added that it was testing a rollback of a "recently introduced change" that may have triggered the issue.

"We're reverting a recently introduced change to determine if this action provides relief from impact upon completion," the company said in a Service Health Status update, adding that it would continue monitoring systems and analysing customer reports.

Some users, particularly those accessing email via iPhones, were advised to re-enter their account passwords manually through device settings to restore access.

The company provided guidance for restoring access. Users are advised to open the Settings app, navigate to Mail, and select Accounts. From there, they should choose the relevant email account, access the account settings or password field (depending on the iOS version), and enter the correct password. After saving the changes, users can open the Mail app to check that emails are syncing and sending correctly.

The outage is the latest in a series of recent technical problems affecting Microsoft services.

Outlook experienced a separate disruption in January, while recent security updates have also been linked to issues including remote desktop failures and application crashes.

Microsoft last week issued emergency updates to address problems that had disrupted some Windows Server systems following its latest monthly security patches.

In March, the company rolled out an urgent fix for a Windows 11 fault that affected authentication across several services, including Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Copilot. The issue was traced to the 10 March Patch Tuesday update (KB5079473), which impacted Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2.

Separately, Microsoft said it had recently resolved a long-standing problem affecting Windows Server 2019 and 2022 systems that were upgrading to newer versions without users' consent.