Teams and Outlook Back Up for Many Impacted by Monday Outage

Microsoft said Teams and Outlook, as well as other Microsoft 365 services, are back online after an outage that lasted for more than two hours for many users on Monday.

“We have resolved an issue preventing users from accessing some of our services,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters.

Partner businesses could go to DownDetector.com, which monitors outages of prominent websites and services, and find that a peak of 18,000 users reported issues with their Microsoft 365 services at around 11 a.m. ET.

Teams and Outlook (Mostly) Restored

Users, however, were still reporting some problems even after Microsoft’s all-clear declaration.

The company stopped an update it was doing on the services to mitigate the impact.

Microsoft on Twitter noted around 1:30 p.m. ET that it had “confirmed recovery for affected Microsoft 365 services and will continue to monitor the services to ensure performance stability.”

Besides Teams and Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint Online also were affected by the outage, but the company has given few specifics as to what caused it.

Deniz Sagnaklar, director of managed services for the extended services provider Entara, said the company is keeping close tabs on its customers.

She said the incident could could have caused more problems.

Entara’s Deniz Sagnaklar

“Due to the Outlook outage, we have been receiving reports of Outlook Web Access not working and some phones not populating emails and/or search not working. We are lucky that the Outlook disruption happened during a weekday as most of our client base works standard business hours from their workstations. If this outage occurred on the weekend when many stay connected through their mobile device, this may have been a larger problem,” Sagnaklar told Channel Futures. “At this time, we’ve confirmed recovery for affected Microsoft 365 services but will continue to monitor the services to ensure performance stability.”

Microsoft users have had to deal with a handful of outages thus far in 2023.