By Belize Live News Staff: If your work email was acting up on Thursday, you were not alone.
Microsoft confirmed a major outage affecting its 365 business services, with Outlook email hit hardest. Reports of problems spiked around midday before starting to ease in the early afternoon, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.
In Belize, the impact reached the tourism industry. A famous resort on Ambergris Caye posted a notice saying the outage was affecting its emails and that replies could be delayed. It urged guests with urgent requests to call instead.
Many Belizean hotels, tour operators, banks and offices use Microsoft 365 for email, meetings and file sharing, so businesses across the country may have experienced delays.
A Microsoft spokesperson told WIRED the company was investigating and thanked customers for their patience as it worked to restore services.
Microsoft said the problem was tied to servers going offline, not a surge in traffic, and that it was rebooting systems to bring them back.
The outage comes just as Belize’s tourism high season gets underway, a busy time for bookings and guest inquiries.
If you are waiting on an urgent reply from a business today, the best advice is simple: pick up the phone.
