Microsoft Outages: Some Outlook And Teams Users Recover As ...

17 hours ago

Forbes

Topline

Microsoft has deployed a fix to restore email and calendar services to thousands of users who reported outages, leading to “incremental recovery” as of Monday evening—but when exactly the programs will completely come back online is still unclear.

The Microsoft Teams logo.

NurPhoto via Getty Images Key Facts

More than 5,300 people had reported issues with Microsoft 365 on the website Down Detector as of 12 p.m. EST on Monday—though reports dropped below 500 by 6 p.m.—with 85% of reports coming from issues with Outlook, 9% with Exchange and 6% with Sharepoint.

The company said most users were having issues accessing Exchange Online—a cloud-based email server—and Microsoft Teams calendars.

Microsoft said it had started to deploy a fix as of 9 a.m.—shortly after reports of issues started spiking significantly—which includes "manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” but did not give an estimated time for full restoration.

The fix reached about 98% of customers as of late Monday morning, but the company later said on X its efforts to restart machines were “progressing slower than anticipated for the majority of affected users.”

By about 6 p.m., Microsoft said its staff “continue to see incremental recovery for some users.”

The company added that a "recent change" was likely responsible for the outage and the change has been reverted.

While Microsoft did not specify what change impacted programs, Monday morning was also the rollout of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders that is meant to take regular snapshots of computer activity—essentially a "photographic memory" for computers—to store on PCs and make searchable later without remembering exact keywords or dates.

The feature first debuted in May but its initial version was criticized for privacy and security concerns, leading the full launch to be postponed.

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Big Number

320 million. That's how many people use Microsoft Teams monthly, according to the company.

Key Background

Outlook and Teams are part of Microsoft 365, the family of software and cloud-based services used by millions of companies worldwide. Microsoft Teams is a collaborative software for chatting, scheduling and video calls between employees.

Forbes Valuation

Microsoft is listed at No. 8 on Forbes' index of the world's most valuable companies. The company, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, hit a $3 trillion valuation in January, the second-ever company to do so. Shares were trading just over $415 on Monday morning—down about 0.3% despite a nearly 0.5% gain for the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Gates is the 15th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $106.5 billion.