Microsoft Outlook hit with hours-long outage

Microsoft's Outlook email service malfunctioned for several hours Wednesday and Thursday, prompting some people to post on social media about the inability to reach their virtual mailboxes.

The issue began at 6:20 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, according to a dashboard the software company maintains. It affected Outlook.com as well as Outlook mobile apps and desktop programs.

At 12:21 ET the Microsoft 365 Status account posted that it was rolling out a fix.

"Our configuration changes have effectively resolved impact in targeted infrastructure. We're now deploying the changes worldwide to resolve impact for all users," Microsoft said in an X post on Thursday afternoon.

The company's status page said "most impacted users will experience relief within the next two hours," and that it was continuing to monitor the service.

On social media, some people reported that Outlook was functioning properly after hours of users posting about problems.

Some posts included screenshots of Outlook that said "something went wrong."

With hundreds of millions of active users, Outlook is important, although Apple and Google's email clients are more popular, according to data from analytics company Litmus.