Microsoft reported significant progress in restoring Outlook and Teams services by Monday evening following a day of disruptions that left thousands of users experiencing delays. The company announced that full restoration is expected by Tuesday, as efforts to address lingering issues continue.
At the peak of the outage, the tracking site Downdetector logged over 5,000 user-reported problems, though these numbers may underestimate the true scale. By late Monday night, Microsoft stated on X (formerly Twitter), “We’ve restored functionality for all impacted services except Outlook on the web, which is still affected for a small number of users. We’re monitoring and troubleshooting to fully recover.”
Earlier in the afternoon, Microsoft deployed a fix that showed some initial success, with Downdetector reports dropping significantly. By 7:30 p.m. ET, the company estimated that the remaining issues would be resolved within three hours.
Despite progress, recovery moved slower than anticipated for some users. Around noon, Microsoft announced that approximately 98% of affected environments had been reached by the fix. However, by 2 p.m. ET, delays in recovery were still being reported, leaving some users without access as the company worked to troubleshoot the remaining issues.
The outage disrupted workflows for many office employees, although some U.S. users on social media welcomed the unexpected pause ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
While the impact of this outage was significant, it pales in comparison to larger incidents this year, such as the CrowdStrike crash over the summer, which caused severe disruptions across industries, including air travel and healthcare, and resulted in billions of dollars in direct losses.
As Microsoft pushes toward a full resolution, the event serves as a reminder of the critical role cloud services play in modern workplaces and the challenges of mitigating large-scale outages.
Leave feedback about this