Microsoft said Monday it was investigating outages impacting its Microsoft 365 service, with thousands of users reporting issues with their Outlook, Exchange or Teams 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 Microsoft 365 outages 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.
Dozens of users, especially those working online, expressed frustration with the outages in posts on the social media platform X.
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.
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: 1:55 p.m.
