Microsoft Outlook and other services still down; company says fixes not going 'as expected'
· Yahoo TechMicrosoft was still investigating a major outage Friday that left users across the world unable to access Outlook email and other products.
The company said it had been unable to find a fix for the issue that started on Thursday, affecting multiple Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online tool.
Outage tracking site Downdetector showed a major spike in reports that hit a peak just before 1 p.m. ET. Users reported problems with its Outlook, Copilot, Teams and Sharepoint services, and some even reported problems accessing Microsoft Word and Excel.
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At 10:13 p.m. ET, Microsoft said its attempts to fix the issue were "not taking as expected."
In an update Friday at 5:28 a.m. ET, the company indicated it was still struggling to resolve the issue, saying it was "seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline."
Microsoft did not provide a specific cause for the outage, but said the issue related to a number of servers being "unexpectedly unavailable." Microsoft executive vice president Charles Lamanna said on X there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."
Government agencies in Japan, Singapore and Australia were among those affected, Reuters reported, while the US House of Representatives was also impacted by the outage. Politico reported one House staffer saying, "There goes a day of legislative work."
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Australian home affairs minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had said it was dealing with something similar to the massive CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
In a message posted Thursday at 12:54 p.m. ET on the official Microsoft 365 Status account on X, the company said it was "investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas."
It subsequently confirmed that the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users "in any region."
Microsoft suffered another widespread outage in September, when the Microsoft 365 suite, which includes Outlook, was down for several days.