Microsoft’s massive Outlook and Teams outage has gone on for hours

Microsoft said Monday that it has identified the cause of a major Outlook and Teams outage, and is deploying a fix to the problem. As of noon ET Monday, outage-tracking site Downdetector showed more than 5,000 user-reported problems, though this data doesn’t fully reflect the scale of the outage.

“We’ve started to deploy a fix which is currently progressing through the affected environment. While this progresses, we’re beginning manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” the company said on X earlier in the day.

Around noon, the company said the fix had reached “approximately 98% of the affected environments,” though reports on Downdetector kept increasing. It can take time for updates to work their way to customers’ systems.

However, Microsoft then noted those restarts were “progressing slower than anticipated for the majority of affected users” and did not yet provide an estimated time for a fix.
The outage has hindered many office workers – though some US users on X celebrated the small break ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Tech outages have had dire effects around the world this year, though Microsoft’s case isn’t as widespread in comparison. In what’s been called the largest IT outage in history, CrowdStrike’s software issue over the summer halted air travel, disrupted hospitals and cost Fortune 500 companies more than $5 billion in direct losses.

Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based app that packages services like Word and Excel, while also providing cloud-based storage, while Teams is primarily used by workplaces for video calls and online chat. Although DownDetector, an online service that tracks tech outages, only had a few dozen reports of problems with 365 as of early Monday morning, users posted on social media that they were experiencing issues with the Microsoft services.

University of Galway “is aware of an issue impacting some Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Outlook Calendars, Teams etc,” noted the Irish university’s IT group on X. “This is an intermittent issue impacting Microsoft 365 customers globally. Microsoft is aware & investigating.”Some users reported problems with Microsoft Outlook, including trouble connecting to the service as well as sending emails, according to DownDetector.

By Agencies