Microsoft 365 Outlook outage, Digi Mart USA News (United Kingdom): Around 4pm on Thursday, many people’s emails stopped working, causing an almost instant outburst of happiness, humour and even relief.
Microsoft, the software company behind much of the productivity software used worldwide, faced a major problem. According to its status pages, a “core process” running Microsoft 365, which handles email, collaboration, word processing and spreadsheets, was “becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding”.
Seven hours later, it remained broken.
More than 450 million people in four million businesses use Microsoft 365, including the Outlook email software. Families, students, government agencies, schools and corporations rely on it.
Although the outage began after working hours in the UK, it was also felt in the US, and in Australia and Asia when the problem persisted into the next morning.
Many users took to social media to complain, while others joked that the product should be renamed Microsoft 364. The Des Moines Public Library used the outage as a marketing opportunity, and the Washington State Department of Health asked people with urgent issues to contact them by phone.
A common theme was that life without email was an unexpected joy. One Washington DC defence analyst said they had not felt so peaceful in ages, while former UN special rapporteur David Kaye said part of him hoped Outlook was down forever.
A US academic described people physically walking to each other’s offices to chat and frantically requesting colleagues’ text numbers.
The return of face-to-face interaction was also celebrated. One user described the building filling with people walking to communicate, while medical researcher Arrianna Planey said she was “honestly grateful” for the outage.
Mississippi English professor Dan Punday asked whether he no longer needed to check email after a day of teaching.
Microsoft’s own research has found that employees are interrupted, on average, every two minutes by meetings, emails and other notifications from their software when it is working. Yale historian Elaine Ayers said she had got much work done with Outlook down.
Many users hoped the outage would continue through Friday. In Australia, where the outage made Friday morning a write-off for many businesses, satirical site The Chaser published a joke headline about the situation.
In the UK, one social media comment said the only annoyance was that the outage would likely be fixed by the time Britons returned to work.
For many companies, Outlook also manages calendars for meetings and deadlines. Without Outlook and Teams, workers were deprived of channels used to raise problems with managers, and managers could not issue instructions to staff.
The outage continued into the night. After midnight UK time, Microsoft reported that servers it had thought were working again “can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic”.
Last month Microsoft announced a major redundancy programme, offering buyouts to 60,000 employees in the US, UK, Canada and India. Analysts linked the move to a cost squeeze caused by the need to invest in AI and data centre infrastructure.
It followed a decision in July to eliminate 4,800 jobs. The company denied that roles were being replaced by AI, but admitted that “some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated”.
Another redundancy round in April affected 7 per cent of its US workforce, and Microsoft laid off 9,000 workers last summer.
