Microsoft announced Tuesday afternoon that it had fully restored services for Outlook and Teams following a technical outage that lasted more than 24 hours. The disruption, which began over the weekend, affected thousands of users, with Downdetector reporting over 5,000 issues at its peak.
By Monday evening, the tech giant reported that most services were operational, except for Outlook on the web, which remained inaccessible to a small number of users. “We’ve restored functionality for all impacted services except Outlook on the web, which is still affected for a small number of users,” Microsoft wrote in a post on X at 11:00 p.m. ET.
The company deployed a fix Monday afternoon, resulting in significant recovery by the evening. Around 7:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft estimated the issue would be resolved within three hours. By noon on Tuesday, the company stated that 98% of affected environments had been restored, but acknowledged ongoing delays in the rollout of updates for some users.
The outage caused disruption for many office workers, though some U.S. users on X lightheartedly welcomed the unexpected downtime ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
While the Microsoft outage was significant, it pales in comparison to other global tech disruptions this year. Over the summer, a software issue with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread chaos, halting air travel, disrupting hospital operations, and resulting in an estimated $5 billion in direct losses for Fortune 500 companies.
Microsoft continues to monitor its systems to ensure full recovery and address any lingering issues.