Microsoft investigating outages affecting Outlook, Teams
An outage at Microsoft impacted thousands of online users on Monday as they attempted to use its Microsoft 365 service for emails, calendars and other features.
Microsoft 365 confirmed early Monday it was looking into an “issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within Microsoft Teams calendar.” About two hours later, shortly before 7 a.m. EST, the company said it determined a “recent change” that led to the issue and began reverting the change.
According to DownDetector, an online service tracking outages, reports of issues with Microsoft’s Outlook, Exchange and Teams features started around 4 a.m. EST and sharply increased shortly before 9 a.m. EST. By 11 a.m. EST, there were more than 4,000 outages reported.
Microsoft began deploying a fix to the affected systems around 9 a.m. EST and by around 11:50 a.m. EST the fix was deployed to nearly 98 percent of the impacted systems, according to the company.
While the fix was sent to the majority of affected users, the “targeted restarts” progressed slower than expected, Microsoft said in a follow-up post. Later Monday afternoon, the tech giant said it completed “additional actions” and saw some recovery.
Dozens of users, especially those working online, expressed frustration with the outages in posts on the social media platform X.
Outage reports appeared to slowly drop around noon, dipping to about 1,340 reports by 4:30 p.m. EST.
One user said their Outlook was “unusable” with “some functionality but not enough to feel confident continuing to work,” while others urged the company to update its status page, which still stated as of early Monday afternoon that there were no issues with Microsoft 365.
The tech company did not expand upon the exact cause of the widespread outages and declined to comment when asked over email.
A Microsoft outage impacted operations around the globe in July after a “defect” in a software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The outage grounded or delayed thousands of flights, took broadcasters off the air and disrupted hospital computer systems and emergency services around the world.
Updated: 5:18 p.m.
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