Everything you need to know about the Microsoft outage

Life is getting back to normal for users of Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams after significant outages yesterday that affected users worldwide.

Earlier this morning, Microsoft said it had restored functionality for all impacted services except Outlook on the web, and that it was monitoring and troubleshooting to fully recover.

"We're still addressing lingering issues with Outlook on the web affecting some users and investigating mail queuing delays causing longer delivery times," the company said in a statement on X.

“Most users and core services have recovered following our mitigation efforts. We're addressing remaining issues and still expect full restoration by Tuesday, November 26, 2024, at 3:00 AM UTC."

The problem emerged around 8am ET yesterday, with several thousand reports of technical issues emerging by lunchtime, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

As of this morning, the number of reports is creeping up again, but are still at far lower levels than yesterday.

The company put the outage down to a recent change which it swiftly reversed.

By midday yesterday, it said it had deployed the fix to around 70% of the affected environments, and was carrying out manual restarts on the remaining impacted machines.

According to Microsoft, around 98% of affected machines have been fixed, although its targeted restarts progressed more slowly than expected. It does, though, expect to get the job finished today.

Users are being encouraged to check the company's admin center for updates, referencing issue MO941162. The next update is expected later today.

Currently, users are being warned that Outlook users may find they can't access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop client, Representational State Transfer (REST) or Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), and that they may experience mail transport delays.

Microsoft outage: Some issues still remain

There's also a warning that Teams users are unable to create or update Virtual Events, including webinars and Town Halls.

They may also be unable to access or modify their calendar in Microsoft Teams, including by loading the calendar, viewing meetings, creating/updating meetings and joining meetings.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s admin center advice notes that Teams users can't create chat, add users, and create or edit meetings; nor can they create or modify new teams and channels.

Users may be unable to update presence, use the search function or see an updated list of files and links failing to load within the Chat shared tab.

These warnings may be removed in the next update, and ITPro will update accordingly.