Microsoft Outlook faced a possible outage this Monday, August 31, 2026, with thousands of users reporting crashes, according to Downdetector.com.

More than 3,000 users reported issues with Downdetector as of 9:06 a.m. PT during the incident.

Most reports pointed to difficulties in receiving messages.

At that time, Microsoft’s status check tool indicated that all products were operational.

Update at 9:16 am: More than 7,000 users had already reported problems with the email service.

Update at 9:32 am: The number of users experiencing problems with Microsoft Outlook has now exceeded 13,000.

Update at 10:35 am: More than 35,000 users had already reported crashes on the platform.

Update at 11:05 am: Almost 50,000 users have already reported problems with Outlook.

Still, Microsoft’s status check tool continued to indicate that all of its products were fully operational.

Outlook affected by Exchange Online service outage

Outlook users faced a frustrating start to the week due to an issue with Microsoft Exchange Online.

Thousands of Microsoft Outlook users started the work week on August 31, 2026 without being able to use the email service. Down Detector, which monitors outages and failures on online platforms, recorded a huge spike in people reporting problems with Outlook around 8am PT on that date. The website had more than 6,000 reports of difficulties at 8:17 am.

A Microsoft representative said the company was conducting an investigation into reports of the flaw.

The official Microsoft 365 Status account published details about what happened on Google Play.

“We have identified an issue with an authentication component that is contributing to the impact,” the message said. “To address this, we have developed a remediation strategy and are applying it to a portion of the infrastructure to test its effectiveness. Once we confirm this resolves the impact, we will apply the remediation more broadly. For more information, see EX1464935 in the admin center.”

This means that Microsoft has formally opened an incident investigation for Exchange Online, and EX1464935 was the case identification number. Many users have been affected by Outlook as the platform relies on Exchange Online for mailbox access and email delivery.

According to Down Detector, 37% of those who reported problems faced difficulties receiving messages, 23% had errors when using the application and 20% reported problems with the website.

“I can’t even open the website, and when I could, I couldn’t search or anything,” reported a user on Reddit.