Updated at 7:09 p.m. CT: Microsoft received an update Monday afternoon, saying that a “gradual recovery of mail flow” was in the works. We continue to roll out our mitigation across the affected environment and users should begin to see a gradual recovery of mail flow. In parallel, we are restarting specific sections of the affected infrastructure to aid recovery from subsequent scenarios. For more information, see EX1464935 and MO1465074 in the admin center. 4:53 pm CT: In a statement provided to Mashable via email, a Microsoft spokesperson issued the following statement: “We are aware of an issue affecting access to Exchange Online and certain other services. We know this is disruptive to customers and we appreciate your patience as we work to restore services as quickly as possible.” Updated at 4:19 pm CT: Microsoft has offered a more specific explanation of what is driving the current outage. In its latest update, the company said its investigation suggests that a “misconfiguration issue” is preventing authentication components from being implemented correctly in some of its infrastructure. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or may have been deleted. In simple terms, it means that an internal change to Microsoft’s authentication system caused some parts of it to not work correctly. Now, Microsoft engineers are analyzing those changes to identify the cause. Updated at 3:47 pm CT: Beginning Monday morning and continuing into the afternoon, thousands of Microsoft business users reported issues with Microsoft Exchange Online (the issues were first reported as an Outlook outage). Now, Microsoft’s official service status page has been updated to reflect what users have been saying for hours: This outage extends far beyond Microsoft Exchange Online. As of this writing, Microsoft’s status page now lists a broader “service degradation” affecting Microsoft 365 for business and enterprise customers. The updated list of affected services includes OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Defender XDR. The company says it is continuing to test its mitigation strategy to ensure the planned fix does not introduce new issues, while exploring other ways to reduce the impact in the meantime. Administrators and enterprise customers can find more information by searching EX1464935 and MO1465074 in the admin center. Mashable Light Speed Previously, the status page showed these services working normally, even as Microsoft acknowledged an issue in X. Meanwhile, users took to social media and Reddit to complain about widespread login failures, missing emails, and inaccessible files. Microsoft Azure and consumer-oriented Microsoft products do not appear to be affected at this time. Microsoft Outlook appears to be down for a significant number of users as of Monday morning. According to Downdetector, reports of Outlook problems increased dramatically just before 11:16 a.m. ET, going from around 37 reports to more than 6,000 in a short period. Credit: DownDetector Of the issues users report, the majority involve receiving messages, followed by app-related issues and login issues, according to Downdetector’s tracking. While most users complain about Outlook issues, Microsoft acknowledged an issue with Microsoft Exchange Online in its Microsoft 365 Status account on X. Exchange Online is “a cloud-based messaging platform that offers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.” This Tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or may have been deleted. The company stated that it was investigating reports of Exchange Online issues, directing users to incident EX1464935 in the admin center for updates. About an hour later, Microsoft followed up to confirm the extent of the issue, saying it had verified that users may be experiencing degraded functionality in several Exchange Online features. The company said it was reviewing the service’s diagnostic and telemetry data to identify the root cause. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or may have been deleted. At the time of writing, Microsoft’s health account issued a more specific update, stating that it had identified an issue with an authentication component that contributed to the outage. According to the post, Microsoft has “developed a remediation strategy” and is testing it to confirm it resolves the impact before rolling it out more broadly. However, as of this writing, Microsoft’s Service Status page says that all of its products are “currently operational.” The outage has caused a lot of frustration online. On X, users have rejected Microsoft’s “degraded functionality” language, with one commenter calling it “a way of saying ‘none of our things work.'” Others reported that the outage lasted for hours, with entire offices and thousands of employees affected around the world, according to posts in Microsoft’s status updates. A parallel Reddit thread on r/Outlook saw a similar avalanche of confirmations from users locked out of the service, with dozens simply chiming in with variations of “down with me” and “Yeah, the whole company is having problems.” This is a developing story… Topics Apps and software Microsoft
