If you or your company make extensive use of Microsoft services, you probably already know that Outlook isn’t working. Nor are Teams, Copilot, Exchange Online, and a collection of other Microsoft-operated services. What you might not know is how extensive the outage is. At last count, some 74 countries are affected.
The outage started yesterday evening. Microsoft says that several of its servers unexpectedly became unavailable, but hasn’t given much detail beyond that. The company said that it will explain the “root cause” in due course, once the outage has been resolved.
Damage Outlook
What this means for the meantime is that your Outlook services will remain offline. Earlier this morning, the company said it has had “marginal success” in restoring global services. The problem doesn’t appear to be external, meaning that Microsoft isn’t under attack. Instead, the company’s experiencing “a problem that’s causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable.”
The current list of Microsoft products affected extends far beyond just its Outlook email client. The ongoing outage is also a perfect illustration of the risks of cloud-based services that rely on a single operator. Even more so when that operator insists you use its products the way it prefers. Convenient infrastructure can also become a single point of failure, causing far more economic harm than if each company administered its own networks. At present, even Anthropic and OpenAI are somewhat affected by Microsoft’s server troubles.
Microsoft’s most recent update (you can find the whole thread of attempted fixes here) says, “We’re seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions. We’re implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery.”
Whether you’ll actually be able to work today remains to be seen. Meta had a global outage in 2021 with far fewer financial effects. That was merely incredibly inconvenient. Here, everyone from banks to governments has ground to a halt.
