Microsoft 'seeing some recovery' after outage impacts Outlook, more

(NEXSTAR) — On Monday, many Outlook users signed on to start their week only to encounter problems with Microsoft services like Outlook and Teams. It seems, however, that relief may be on the way.

User reports on Downdetector show issues with Microsoft 365, Teams, Outlook, and the Microsoft Store began around 5 a.m. ET on Monday.

In a series of posts to X, the Microsoft 365 Status account explained that at around 2 a.m. ET, it was "investigating an issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within Microsoft Teams calendar."

Later on, the account said a "recent change" was believed to have caused the interruptions. At around 9 a.m. ET, a fix was deployed and "progressing through the affected environment."

Late Monday morning, Microsoft said a fix had been deployed to nearly all of the affected environments. Progress continued until early in the afternoon when Microsoft reported that it was "facing delays in our recovery efforts" and "taking immediate action to address them."

"We understand the significant impact of this event to your businesses and are working to provide relief as soon as possible," the company said just before 1 p.m. ET.

At around 3:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft posted to X that it had "completed additional actions" and was "seeing some recovery."

"We’re continuing to monitor the service while we complete other workstreams intended to fully resolve the issue," the company wrote.

What does this all mean for you? If you can't access Outlook, Teams, or other parts of your Microsoft 365 subscription, you may be stuck waiting on Microsoft's recovery efforts.

In September, another Microsoft outage impacted thousands of people using Outlook, Teams, cloud services, Skype, SharePoint, and more. In that outage, Microsoft blamed a third-party ISP's managed environment for the issues.

Earlier this year, Microsoft was seemingly at the center of another widespread outage that impacted banks, media companies, hospitals, and airports. The initial issue was traced back to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that had pushed out an update to several million Microsoft computers, disrupting their operating systems.

Among the hardest hit by that outage was Delta Air Lines, which claimed in a recent lawsuit against CrowdStrike that their operations were crippled for several days. Delta canceled about 7,000 flights over a five-day period during the peak summer vacation season.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.