Microsoft Outlook and Teams are down — and might be for a while

As reported by Deadline, over 5,000 people have reported issues with different Microsoft 365 apps since around 8 a.m. ET this morning. The outage is affecting worldwide usage of email and calendar services associated with Exchange, Outlook, and Teams.

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 posted on X during the morning to acknowledge the problem and has since deployed a fix that, as of around noon, has reached 98% of the affected environments. The fix involves “manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state.”

However, around an hour later, the company said that the fix was progressing slower than anticipated for the majority of affected users. At 2 p.m. ET, Microsoft published another post announcing further delays with the fix and apologizing for the impact on businesses. As of the time of writing, the company has yet to provide an estimated time for full restoration.

We’re facing delays in our recovery efforts and are taking immediate action to address them. We understand the significant impact of this event to your businesses and are working to provide relief as soon as possible. More details can be found in the admin center under MO941162.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 25, 2024

These updates, all of which were sent out on X, have been met with criticism in the comments section because there are seemingly no messages or posts about the outage in the 365 portal or Admin Center, and the status page continued to say services were up and running. According to multiple comments, X is not where admins want to go to get their outage updates.

Microsoft has not elaborated on the “recent change” it cites that is causing the problems. Perhaps coincidentally, however, Monday also marked the launch of the latest Recall preview, which is now available for Windows Insiders to try out and test. The feature — which takes regular screenshots of your PC and allows you to search for anything you’ve looked at on it — is due to be rigorously tested by security professionals to see if Microsoft’s privacy claims are accurate and well-implemented.