Microsoft’s massive Outlook and Teams outage has gone on for hours

Microsoft said Monday that it has identified the cause of a major Outlook and Teams outage, and is deploying a fix to the problem.

Microsoft said Monday that it has identified the cause of a major Outlook and Teams outage, and is deploying a fix to the problem. As of noon ET Monday, outage-tracking site Downdetector showed more than 5,000 user-reported problems, though this data doesn’t fully reflect the scale of the outage. “We’ve started to deploy a fix which is currently progressing through the affected environment. While this progresses, we’re beginning manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” the company said on X earlier in the day. Around noon, the company said the fix had reached “approximately 98% of the affected environments,” though reports on Downdetector kept increasing. It can take time for update deployments to work their way through to customers’ systems. The outage has hindered many office workers – though some US users on X celebrated the small break ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Tech outages have had dire effects around the world this year, though Microsoft’s case isn’t as widespread in comparison. In what’s been called the largest IT outage in history, CrowdStrike’s software issue over the summer halted air travel, disrupted hospitals and cost Fortune 500 companies more than $5 billion in direct losses.