Microsoft outage strands office workers nationwide

By Ramishah Maruf, CNN

New York (CNN) — Microsoft’s widespread outage left users across the United States unable to access their Outlook email, leaving office workers stranded (or celebrating).

“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company posted on X Thursday afternoon.

While reports of Outlook outages have decreased from a peak of more than 130,000 earlier in the afternoon, as of 8:00 p.m. ET roughly 31,000 still reported issues, according to Downdetector. The outage appears to have begun shortly after noon.

The outage continued for much of the workday across the United States; the company later said it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”

Earlier in the day, it said in an update that the problems stemmed from “failed health checks” that may have originated “from a specific component on the affected servers that’s responsible for processing them.” Later on, it said it was restarting those servers because they “have become unresponsive.”

The company said at 8:00 p.m. Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. That includes Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, 365 and Copilot AI.

Meanwhile, many in Corporate America don’t seem to be in much of a rush. “no outlook, no teams…. how about we all just go home,” one X user posted today.

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