Microsoft Outlook outage: What happened?

On the Monday before Thanksgiving? How dare they.

Microsoft Outlook and Teams are down. Maybe it’s a sign to quit for the day?

Credit: Thomas Trutschel / Photothek / Getty Images

A Microsoft outage on Monday has affected Outlook and Teams users. Microsoft is aware of the issue and working on a fix, but said it’s “facing delays in our recovery efforts.”

Reports of issues began around 8 a.m. ET and spiked around 12:30 p.m. ET, according to DownDetector (which shares a parent company with Mashable). Reported outages have since tapered off, suggesting the issue might be resolved soon.

The Microsoft 365 account on X said, “We’ve identified a recent change which we believe has resulted in impact.” It’s unclear what specifically caused the outage besides mention of a recent change. But Microsoft’s controversial AI-powered Recall feature was launched today for Windows Insiders in preview mode. Big deployments like Recall, which takes incremental snapshots of a user’s screen, are sometimes the culprit for causing mass outages.

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Users took to X to express their frustration at not being able to access basic tools like Outlook for sending emails and Teams for video calls.

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Others didn’t seem to mind the multi-hour outage on the Monday before Thanksgiving when they would otherwise be working.

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The outage seems to be on its way to resolution, but we will share updates if that’s not the case.

Cecily is a tech reporter at Mashable who covers AI, Apple, and emerging tech trends. Before getting her master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School, she spent several years working with startups and social impact businesses for Unreasonable Group and B Lab. Before that, she co-founded a startup consulting business for emerging entrepreneurial hubs in South America, Europe, and Asia. You can find her on Twitter at @cecily_mauran.

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