Microsoft outage hits home
DMG affected but not delayed
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HOUGHTON -- Microsoft said Friday that the outage that began Thursday affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
Microsoft said Friday it is fixing the massive global outage for its popular workplace software that dragged on into a second day, disrupting everything from emails to police emergency calls and AI tools.
A wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were affected.
Microsoft first flagged the problem on Thursday. It indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services in fresh updates posted Friday on social media.
The extent of the outage wasn't clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
The global outage reached the U.P. and affected newspaper reporting and delivery. Daily Mining Gazette Community Editor Mark Wilcox said that initially the outage brought the paper to a standstill. “The Daily Mining Gazette, as well as the other U.P. newspapers owned by Ogden Newspapers, rely on Outlook for a variety of services.” Wilcox said, in addition to email, the Gazette relies on Microsoft Teams to communicate with sister newspapers and the design hub in West Virginia. “With Outlook disabled, all communications within the Ogden family were severed,” he said.
Without too much delay, Wilcox and the DMG staff came up with a workaround. “Fortunately most people have one or more email platforms in addition to Outlook. Rather than communicating normally, our writers were able to submit, stories pictures and video via Gmail.” Wilcox said it took a bit longer but with a bit of extra effort the content of Thursday’s paper was sent to West Virginia right on time. In addition, Gazette and Ogden personnel were able to utilize Teams via cell phones rather than on the email platform.
“With a bit of creativity, commitment. communication and old fashioned team work,” we were able to overcome a major communications glitz that literally impacted the world,” Wilcox added.
As of Friday morning in North America, Microsoft's Outlook email service was up and running again for many users.
The company pointed to recovery improvements -- writing on social media just after 9 a.m. EDT that email queues were "significantly reduced and approaching normal levels." But Microsoft warned that some users may still encounter "intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery."
When Microsoft's outage first erupted on Thursday, tracker Downdetector said it received outage reports from 74 countries and territories in the matter of about an hour.
"Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level," Downdetector wrote in an update on social media Thursday afternoon.