Expert discusses widespread Microsoft Outlook outage

The hours-long outage began Thursday morning after thousands of users were unable to access emails and cloud tools. Microsoft said it was caused by an "elevated system load" after a number of servers went offline, overwhelming the remaining network. In a later update, Microsoft reported that some servers had returned to service and initially appeared healthy, but they stopped responding again once they began receiving traffic. Engineers are analyzing data from the affected servers and working to restore service to all affected users. As capacity returns, Microsoft said users may see a gradual recovery as their devices and apps reconnect to the service.