There are a few ways to react when Outlook goes down in the middle of the workday. Some people keep refreshing their inboxes or ask a coworker if theirs is loading. On Thursday, plenty of people used the downtime to post on social media, where an afternoon without email turned out to be pretty good material.
An ongoing Microsoft 365 outage left people struggling to open their work inboxes, and Microsoft said other services, including Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, could also be affected. Reports of Outlook problems began spiking around 12:30 p.m. ET, and by 1:12 p.m. ET, Downdetector had logged more than 130,000 reports, as Mashable previously reported, with the apt subtitle, “Because there’s not enough happening in the tech world today…”
For some X users, the outage hit just as they were getting started with their days. “As soon as I sign in outlook is down. Aww man!” wrote one user. Another declared himself “off work for the afternoon.” In a reply to Microsoft’s outage alert, one X user said, “if outlook doesnt work in the next 15 minutes we should all be able to leave work early today.”
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For others, the outage landed around lunchtime on the East Coast, and Adweek had an idea for how to spend it. “outlook is down which means the three-martini lunch is back,” the publication posted on X. In the replies, users were grateful to “whoever chewed the wires at the outlook offices, bless your heart fr,” while some were very worried about the state of their inbox. “oh noooo Outlook is down, how will I respond to all of these very important emails? ahhh I hope they hurry up and fix it oh noooooo”
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There was a good chunk of those on social media who weren’t surprised one bit by the outage. “If I had a dime for every 365 issue, I’d be rich!” wrote one user on Reddit. Another said Microsoft’s Power Platform was running slowly. “So everything is as expected.” One commenter dubbed the service “Microsoft 364,” and another figured it would be down to Microsoft 363 if the outage lasted more than 48 hours. “Microsoft when Outlook and Teams go down. Again,” wrote one user on X, alongside a GIF from The Naked Gun in which Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin tells a crowd there’s “nothing to see here” as a fireworks factory explodes behind him. Subtle comparison.
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What else was affected by the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft first flagged trouble accessing Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas at 12:54 p.m. ET. The company later said the outage could affect Microsoft 365 users in any region. Microsoft’s public status page listed consumer products as operational, while its business and enterprise customers faced connectivity issues.
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Exchange Online, the service behind many work and school Outlook inboxes, was the hardest hit. Microsoft also listed Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online, and Defender XDR as potentially affected. The company said unusually high load on part of its infrastructure was likely contributing to the connection problems and that it had rerouted traffic and was restarting affected servers.
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