Microsoft says attempts to fix outage affecting Outlook and Teams not going ‘as expected’

Detailed summary

‘We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,’ Microsoft said in a statement

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Major Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365, experienced widespread outages affecting thousands of users, as the tech giant said its changes are “not taking as expected”.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected,” Microsoft wrote on X on Friday.

“We’re continuing to monitor the results of changes applied so we can identify strategic actions that can help to improve service health across all affected regions,” the software giant said in its latest update.

The disruption extended to integration connectors used by AI providers OpenAI and Anthropic.

Almost 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook just after 1.00pm ET on outage tracker Downdetector, a website that tracks outages by aggregating status reports from several sources.

Reports have since fallen somewhat, but many users said they still couldn't send and receive emails or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether.

Downdetector also recorded more than 38,000 user reports concerning problems with Microsoft 365, alongside roughly 4,500 reports of users encountering difficulties accessing Teams.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," Microsoft said in an earlier statement.

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