Thursday was a tough work day for many — or maybe, a great one, depending on how eager you are to access work-related programs. Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365, experienced a significant outage.
Overnight heading into Friday, the company said via its Microsoft 365 Status account on X that the “impact has been resolved,” an hour after a post offering a little more detail on the process: “We’ve restored access to the affected services and mail flow remains stable. While recovery efforts remain ongoing, we are methodically addressing the small number of remaining affected services to ensure full service stability.”
As the Friday workday was starting on the East Coast, some people were replying on X that they were still seeing issues with email not working.
The outage had a widespread impact on Outlook and Microsoft 365 users across the US, as well as in Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Japan, according to the site-monitoring service Downdetector. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
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Downdetector said that it logged nearly 350,000 outage reports in a 24-hour span, making this incident one of the most significant Microsoft productivity disruptions in recent months. The service’s data shows the disruption began escalating shortly after 11 a.m. PT on Thursday and peaked around 12:15 p.m. PT.
While Outlook and Microsoft 365 saw the heaviest impact, users also reported issues with Teams, Azure, and the Microsoft Store, suggesting a broader cloud-level incident, according to Downdetector.
Outages of online services, even short ones, can have a significant impact, given how heavily people’s work and personal lives depend on access to the internet. Last June, Microsoft Outlook users suffered through a one-day outage, and just a week later users of Gmail and other Google Workspace services got slammed. In the last several months, the internet has also been rocked by outages affecting cloud service providers Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services, and just last week customers of Verizon Wireless endured a daylong loss of cellular service.
Microsoft has not yet explained what caused this week’s failure. In an email to CNET Thursday evening, a company spokesperson said that the company was addressing “a service functionality issue.”
To keep tabs on Microsoft issues, you can follow the official Microsoft 365 Status account on X and you can also monitor Microsoft’s Service Health Status page. That page now says that “all products are operational.”
Responding to user complaints Friday morning about lingering outage issues, the Microsoft 365 Status account said that “clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation.”
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