Microsoft announced on Monday that it has pinpointed the root cause of a significant outage affecting its Outlook and Teams services. The tech giant is currently in the process of deploying a fix to address the issue that has impacted a large number of users.
As of noon ET on Monday, more than 5,000 user-reported problems were recorded on the outage-tracking site Downdetector. However, it is important to note that this data may not fully capture the extent of the outage.
In a statement earlier in the day, Microsoft stated, “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.”
By midday, Microsoft reported that the fix had been implemented in approximately 98% of the affected environments. Despite this progress, reports of issues on Downdetector continued to rise, highlighting the time it can take for updates to reach all customer systems.
The outage has had a notable impact on office workers, with many experiencing disruptions in their daily operations. However, some users in the US found a silver lining in the situation, viewing it as a brief respite ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
This incident adds to a series of tech outages that have had far-reaching consequences globally throughout the year. While Microsoft’s case is significant, it is not as widespread as some other high-profile outages. For instance, CrowdStrike’s software issue over the summer was dubbed the largest IT outage in history, causing disruptions in air travel, healthcare services, and leading to substantial financial losses for Fortune 500 companies, totaling over $5 billion.
