Countless folks found themselves unable to read or send email on Saturday afternoon as an apparent outage affected Microsoft Outlook email.

Microsoft said in an update later Saturday that it had identified a potential cause of the issues after Downdetector, an online service that tracks tech outages, began getting outages reported for Microsoft Outlook about 3:30 p.m. ET

Over 32,000 reports of outages or other issues had been submitted by 4 p.m. ET.

Issues affected additional Microsoft programs, with reports hitting Downdetector about problems with Microsoft 365, which includes Outlook, Word, Excel and other programs (about 25,000 reports). The outage monitoring site also got smaller amounts of reports of problems at the Microsoft Store and Microsoft Azure, the software giant’s cloud computing platform.

“We’ve identified a potential cause of impact and have reverted the suspected code to alleviate impact,” the Microsoft 365 Status account said on X just after 5 p.m. ET. “We’re monitoring telemetry to confirm recovery.”

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USA TODAY journalists began receiving emails shortly after 4:30 p.m. ET.

With email unavailable, users went to social media to complain and commiserate. “If anyone is panicking about Microsoft 365, specifically Outlook being down, do not worry. It is not just you,” one posted.

Follow Mike Snider on Threads, Bluesky and X:mikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social  & @mikesnider.

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