Outlook email

Question

When can we expect the email to be up again? We are relying a lot of our email communication for our business.

Answer 1

Your Microsoft 365 administrator should check Microsoft 365 admin center → Health → Service health → Exchange Online, because any available restoration estimate and Microsoft’s latest recovery updates are published there for your organization.^1^

Check the restoration status

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center with an administrator, Service Support administrator, or Helpdesk administrator account.
2. Select Health → Service health.
3. Under Active issues Microsoft is working on, open the Exchange Online or Outlook incident.
4. Review:
   • Status
   • User impact
   • Last updated
   • All updates, where Microsoft posts investigation and restoration progress

An exact recovery time cannot be determined outside your tenant’s incident record. If the status is Restoring service or Extended recovery, remediation is underway, but recovery may reach affected systems gradually. When Exchange Online is shown as degraded, Microsoft engineers are already working on the incident; continue monitoring that record rather than changing Outlook profiles or devices.^2^

To receive updates automatically, go to Service health → Customize → Email, enable service-health notifications, and select the relevant services. Notifications can be sent to up to two addresses per administrator.^1^

If the admin center is unavailable

Use Microsoft’s public service status page. It is intended for checking known issues when administrators cannot access the tenant-specific Service health dashboard.^1^

If no Exchange Online incident appears

Select Report an issue on the Service health page. Microsoft correlates the report with data from other organizations and creates an incident or advisory if it identifies a service-side problem.^1^

As a quick isolation test, open the affected mailbox in Outlook on the web:

• If email works on the web but not in Classic Outlook, the problem is likely limited to the desktop client or computer.
• If multiple employees cannot send or receive through both Outlook on the web and Classic Outlook, have the administrator investigate Exchange Online service health and mail flow rather than treating it as an individual Outlook profile issue.^2^

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References

1. How to check Microsoft 365 service health
2. Find and fix email delivery issues as a Microsoft 365 for business admin

Answer 2

Hi @Donald Lim

Thank you for reaching out and sharing how critical this is for your business operations.

Microsoft has recently acknowledged an active service incident (MO1550821) involving connectivity issues across multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online (which powers Outlook), Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint Online.

Because Microsoft's engineering team is currently actively investigating and working on a fix, there isn't an exact estimated time of restoration available yet. Here is how you can track real-time updates:

If you are a Microsoft 365 Admin: You can monitor the live status, root cause updates, and next scheduled update times directly in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center under Health > Service health (search for incident ID MO1550821).

If you are an end user: Please reach out to your organization's IT or Microsoft 365 administrator so they can track incident MO1550821 in the Admin Center and keep your team updated as soon as service is restored.

I understand how disruptive email downtime is for business communication, and Microsoft is treating this as a priority to get services back up as quickly as possible.