Microsoft’s ‘Outlook Not So Good’ After a Five-Hour Outage Knocks Out Email and Teams

My boss yesterday: “Did you get my email?” 

Me: ¯\(ツ)/¯

Sooo, how was everyone’s Thursday half day? ICYMI, Microsoft pulled a CrowdStrike on itself. Shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, Outlook, Teams, and the rest of Microsoft 365 crapped out across regions, and some of it stayed dead for more than five hours. Outlook reports on Downdetector alone peaked at about 130,000.

For context, Exchange Online (think: your work email) took the worst of it. But SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, and even Defender XDR, Microsoft’s cybersecurity software, went down too, which, comforting. Per Microsoft: “We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.” Translation: we have no f*cking clue.

So what happened? The company that still hasn’t figured out how to make images work in Word first blamed “elevated load across multiple regions.” Later, it admitted that a “number of servers” had gone “unexpectedly unavailable” and were failing automated health checks, which dumped their work on the servers still standing and sent Exchange into a death spiral. Friendly reminder: Outlook also face-planted for about eight hours in January, and Exchange was down bad for a couple of days in late August.

At 4 p.m., Microsoft said it had “validated an alternative service health check method” that got some servers back online. Two hours later, it still couldn’t get it all the way back up (BONK). Its plan from here: “automated recovery systems to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers.” In other words, a robot that turns it off and back on again. By Thursday night, Microsoft said all that restarting was finally showing “positive results.”

Meanwhile, the online bookstore wanted everyone to know this had nothing to do with it. After AWS and Google users piled onto Downdetector too, Amazon hopped on X to say AWS was “operating normally.” It blamed “an unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet” (read: Microsoft) for some “inaccurate news reports” and pointed people to its health dashboard for “accurate data.” Big talk from the cloud that broke the internet a year ago.

Oh, and the outage knocked out OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s Microsoft 365 connectors, too. Workhorse, the EV truck maker the Postal Service ghosted back in 2021, even pushed its Q3 earnings to Monday, citing the outage. Workhorse also rescheduled its Q3 call in 2023 and 2024. Probably just a coincidence.

As for Microsoft, shares… *double checks notes*…  closed up a hair Thursday at around $523. Apparently, Microsoft investors like it a little rough. Love to see it. 

Until next time, friends… 

 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Microsoft, Amazon, and Google as mentioned in the article.