WASHINGTON — A massive Microsoft outage left millions of users around the world without access to their email and work apps on Thursday. Reports of problems with Outlook,…
WASHINGTON — A massive Microsoft outage left millions of users around the world without access to their email and work apps on Thursday. Reports of problems with Outlook, the company’s email client, climbed to about 130,000 on the outage tracking site Downdetector shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (18:00 GMT), with some users saying emails weren’t being sent or received, while others couldn’t open their inboxes.
Users also reported having trouble accessing Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, along with other Microsoft 365 services. The company said the issues could impact users in any region. Microsoft said on X that servers were unavailable and failing automatic health checks, putting pressure on those still operating.
It said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute traffic that was elevated on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services to bring them back online.“We’re working to safely return them to service,” the company said. In the United States, fed-up workers at some companies went home early on Thursday. In Australia, businesses couldn’t print invoices and some schools couldn’t hold online classes on Friday. And there was no quick fix. As of 3:30 a.m.
GMT on Friday, the outage was still widespread, affecting untold millions of people. Microsoft is posting updates on X and on its “service health status” page.“We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner,” Microsoft said in an update at 1:59 a.m. GMT.But in another post at 3:13 a.m.
GMT, the company said, “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected.”“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” the company added, leaving users on X befuddled. The disruption has been going on for many hours, causing a wide range of reactions. Some US office workers celebrated the email blackout and joked that they could start the weekend early.
This is a source-linked briefing. Read the original report from Saudi Gazette .