Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Exchange are currently down for many users worldwide.
Although it’s currently unclear exactly how pervasive it is, there appears to be a significant outage for many Microsoft 365 users globally. Reports on Downdetector, a platform that monitors service outages, began appearing in early Monday morning BST and CET as workers were logging in to start their working week. Over 800 users reported issues with the services, indicating a widespread disruption.
Among the issues specifically cited are the inability to access Teams Calendar, Outlook, and Exchange, and Outlook crashing for some users. Others could not load or send email attachments or could not log into the server. Some users reported partial functionality of the services, with specific features working normally, while others experienced issues. For example, emails could be received, but attachments might fail to load correctly.
Microsoft has said it’s looking into the incident:
We’re investigating an issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within Microsoft Teams calendar.”
Microsoft also directed affected users to its online admin centre.
On X on Monday morning, Microsoft provided an update, saying it found “a recent change which we believe has resulted in impact”. “We’ve started to revert the change and are investigating what additional actions are required to mitigate the issue,” it added.
We’re investigating an issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within Microsoft Teams calendar. For more information, please refer to MO941162 in the admin center.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 25, 2024
Microsoft’s service status website indicated that all systems were operating normally by 2 pm on Monday BST. Microsoft 365 Status also reported on Monday afternoon it had reverted the problematic change and initiated a fix, which was being deployed across the affected environment. It further stated, “While this progresses, we’re beginning manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state.” However, some users were still reporting issues on Tuesday morning BST.
The digital landscape is still recovering from July’s global IT outage, which was ultimately traced to a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The incident, which affected many Microsoft solutions, initially sparked fears of a mass cyberattack targeting Microsoft by malicious actors.
While investigations later confirmed that CrowdStrike’s update error caused the disruption, the incident highlighted the fragility of the working world’s dependence on Microsoft’s solutions.
