Microsoft Outlook Slowly Recovering After Day-Long Outage

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Microsoft reports that services in its Microsoft Office 365 suite are slowly coming back online after a widespread outage.

According to AP, Microsoft’s outage began on Thursday and lasted all day. In a series of posts on X, the company said it was struggling to find a fix. “Our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company wrote in a social media post.

If you work at any kind of desk job, there’s a strong chance you rely on Outlook. The New York Times reports that the outage laid bare just how many essential organizations rely on Microsoft to keep their services up and running. Earlier this year, Microsoft said that it had 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions, which include Outlook and Teams. So it’s no exaggeration to say millions of people had their productivity impacted by the outage.

From The New York Times:

Corporate offices, government agencies and other services in dozens of countries were forced to adapt as workers struggled to complete the everyday tasks intertwined with its products.

In Britain, the National Health Service said the outage was having a “disruptive impact” on its services and the Metropolitan Police in London said its online contact forms weren’t working. In Australia, intelligence and police forces said that their operations had been affected. Singapore told its taxpayers that email capabilities had been disrupted, and the Supreme Court of the Philippines and the European Court of Human Rights said the outage could cause delays in their work.

Marten AttaAlla, a cardiothoracic surgeon pausing for lunch near St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London, said the outage had complicated efforts to staff an intensive care unit after somebody had called in sick.

It was kind of funny at my day job when everyone was slowly realizing that Outlook wasn’t working. I needed to email myself some marketing materials off the company phone for a project I was working on, and the email never came through. Luckily, I found a somewhat convoluted solution, but some of my other co-workers weren’t so lucky.

While I do marketing for a parks and recreation department, so my work isn’t essential, it is kind of alarming to know that a city government was brought to a standstill by a technical glitch. While Microsoft hasn’t completely fixed the error, it’s reported that its services have started to come back online.

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” the company said, as some users started reporting that their emails were restored. Microsoft reported “broader improvements” in North America with “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” and “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region.

I can report on my end that Outlook is working for me again, as I finally received the email I sent myself yesterday while writing this piece.

I just think it’s kind of funny that this nearly two-day-long outage comes as Microsoft doubles down on its commitments to AI. Microsoft announced last month that it would be offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, and apparently intends to replace them with AI agents.

Not to mention that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has gone on record saying that AI is generating 30% of the code Microsoft uses for its products. Who knows how much code AI accounts for now? What’s going to happen when Nadella’s vision comes to pass, and there aren’t any humans on deck to solve problems like these? I’ve been giving Microsoft side-eye for years now, and this week only made me double down on that feeling.

I’m just so excited for our technologically advanced future, y’all.

Microsoft Outlook Slowly Recovering After Day-Long Outage was originally published on newsone.com