Microsoft 365 Outage Continues, Showing Gradual Recovery
Microsoft's multi-day outage affecting Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services shows gradual recovery, but issues persist as the company continues mitigation.
According to TechCrunch, the outage began with an issue impacting Exchange Online, leading to email delays, authentication failures, and other problems for some Outlook users. Microsoft made significant progress on Monday, but as of Tuesday the latest update on X said that 'mitigation actions are continuing to progress.' The company did not yet say the service is back to normal.
The impact spread beyond Outlook. Microsoft's status page for Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise indicated that services including SharePoint, Copilot, Teams, Purview, Defender XDR, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Universal Print were also affected. The page attributed the problems to a 'core authentication configuration used by multiple Microsoft 365 services.'
Microsoft's investigation found that a misconfiguration was preventing authentication components from 'deploying as expected to a portion of infrastructure.' The company reviewed recent changes, then tested and implemented various mitigations. By 10 p.m. ET on Monday, mail flow was improving but search functionality remained degraded. Shortly after 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Microsoft said search functionality was also improving.
In its latest message, Microsoft said 'indications from telemetry remain positive' and that service availability is improving. The company said it is now entering a period of extended monitoring to ensure a full resolution.