Updated on: November 27, 2024
Microsoft fully restored its services after experiencing a global outage earlier in the day yesterday.
“After a period of extended monitoring, we confirmed through customer reports and service health telemetry that the issue is resolved,” the company said in a recent statement.
The disruption, which began early in the morning, affected key business tools, including such as Outlook, Teams and Exchange Online, and SharePoint, leaving many office workers unable to communicate. Some were completely cut off from the services they rely on, and others reported limited access — for example, they were able to receive email but weren’t able to download attachments.
At its peak, Downdetector, an online service that tracks tech outages, logged more than 5,000 outage reports as users across the globe were impacted.
Microsoft acknowledged the problem at 4 a.m. ET, saying, “We’re investigating an issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within Microsoft Teams calendar.”
Microsoft implemented a fix later on and said most users had regained access to its services. It also noted that slower performance was due to the ongoing recovery efforts.
The company explained that a recent system change impacted several of its core services and triggered the widespread outage. The fix that Microsoft rolled out is a 2-pronged recovery strategy: a global update to the software, coupled with manual restarts on affected machines to speed up the restoration of services.
“We’ve started to deploy a fix which is currently progressing through the affected environment. While this progresses, we’re beginning manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” the company said.
Fixing Outlook took Microsoft the longest. Earlier in the morning, the company confirmed it mostly restored its services, except for Outlook on the web.
“We’re still addressing lingering issues with Outlook on the web affecting some users and investigating mail queuing delays causing longer delivery times.”