Microsoft announced late Monday evening that most of its Outlook and Teams services had been restored following a day of significant technical disruptions.
Full Recovery Expected by Tuesday
While services were largely restored, the company confirmed that full recovery, including Outlook on the web for a small subset of users, would take until Tuesday. “We’ve restored functionality for all impacted services except Outlook on the web,” Microsoft stated in a post on X around 11:00 p.m. ET. “We’re monitoring and troubleshooting to fully recover.”
Scale of the Outage
At its peak, outage-tracking platform Downdetector reported over 5,000 user complaints, though this figure may not fully represent the extent of the disruption.
Progress Throughout the Day
By Monday afternoon, Microsoft deployed a fix, which brought partial recovery, leading to a sharp drop in reported issues on Downdetector. By 7:30 p.m. ET, the company estimated the situation would be resolved within three hours. Earlier in the day, around noon, Microsoft reported that the fix had reached “approximately 98% of the affected environments.” However, the recovery process faced delays, with restarts progressing slower than anticipated.
User Reactions and Broader Context
The outage impacted many office workers, though some U.S. users jokingly appreciated the unexpected break ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
This disruption follows a year marked by significant tech outages worldwide. While Microsoft’s incident was relatively contained, larger-scale disruptions, like CrowdStrike’s summer outage, have had more severe consequences. That particular failure, dubbed the largest IT outage in history, disrupted air travel, hospitals, and major corporations, causing over $5 billion in direct losses.
