Microsoft has deployed a fix to restore email and calendar services to thousands of users who reported outages, leading to “incremental recovery” as of Monday evening—but when exactly the programs will completely come back online is still unclear.
Key Facts
More than 5,300 people had reported issues with Microsoft 365 on the website Down Detector as of 12 p.m. EST on Monday—though reports dropped below 500 by 6 p.m.—with 85% of reports coming from issues with Outlook, 9% with Exchange and 6% with Sharepoint.
The company said most users were having issues accessing Exchange Online—a cloud-based email server—and Microsoft Teams calendars.
Microsoft said it had started to deploy a fix as of 9 a.m.—shortly after reports of issues started spiking significantly—which includes "manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” but did not give an estimated time for full restoration.
The fix reached about 98% of customers as of late Monday morning, but the company later said on X its efforts to restart machines were “progressing slower than anticipated for the majority of affected users.”
By about 6 p.m., Microsoft said its staff “continue to see incremental recovery for some users.”
The company added that a "recent change" was likely responsible for the outage and the change has been reverted.
While Microsoft did not specify what change impacted programs, Monday morning was also the rollout of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders that is meant to take regular snapshots of computer activity—essentially a "photographic memory" for computers—to store on PCs and make searchable later without remembering exact keywords or dates.
The feature first debuted in May but its initial version was criticized for privacy and security concerns, leading the full launch to be postponed.
