Outlook Down

Microsoft Outlook Is Down, Probably Because It’s Microsoft Outlook

Today has been considered a sort of "snow day" if your job runs on Microsoft. Starting late Thursday morning, Microsoft Outlook went down for a huge number of people. Reports on the outage tracker Downdetector peaked at around 130,000.

And it wasn’t just email. Microsoft says the outage also took out Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, and its Defender security tools, and users reported problems with OneDrive and Office online too. That’s basically the whole office, minus the printer, which was already broken.

Microsoft’s explanation got more interesting as the day went on. First, the company said part of its infrastructure was under “elevated load,” which is corporate for “too busy.” Then it said actually, no, there wasn’t extra traffic. A bunch of its servers had just stopped showing up, leaving the rest to cover their shifts. Later, Microsoft said the part of its system that checks whether servers are healthy might be the real problem, and that it was looking into recent configuration updates.

In plain English: someone may have changed a setting, the system decided a bunch of perfectly healthy servers were sick, sent them all home, and everything fell over. It’s the most relatable thing Microsoft has ever done.

By the evening, Microsoft had some servers back up and running, with one small catch: they could crash again as soon as people started using them. So, Outlook.

As of this writing, the outage still isn’t fully over. If you need us, we’ll be outside, enjoying the snow day.