Microsoft 365 Outage Persists, Yet Signs of Improvement Emerge
Microsoft is currently on the second day of addressing a multi-day outage that has impacted customer access to Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 services.
On Monday, significant progress was made in resolving the issue, which stemmed from a problem with its Exchange Online service. This led to email delays, failures, authentication issues, and other complications for various Outlook users.
However, as of Tuesday, the situation has not been completely rectified. Microsoft’s recent update on X indicates that while their “mitigation actions are continuing to progress,” this does not quite equate to saying “all is well.”
Although Outlook has drawn the majority of the focus, Microsoft’s status page for Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) indicates that other services were also affected, including SharePoint, Copilot, Teams, Purview, Defender XDR, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Universal Print.
These issues were attributed to a problem with a “core authentication configuration utilized by multiple Microsoft 365 services.”
In the early hours, Microsoft communicated via X the steps they were taking to rectify an issue identified during their investigation, which was found to be a misconfiguration impacting their service. This misconfiguration hindered authentication components from “deploying as expected to a portion of infrastructure.”
Initially, Microsoft reviewed recent changes that may have caused this issue and began testing and implementing various mitigations to alleviate the situation for end users. Over time, as these mitigations were rolled out, Microsoft indicated that Outlook users should experience “gradual recovery” in their mail flow. By 10 p.m. ET on Monday, the company reported improved mail flow, although search functionality continued to suffer.
Shortly after 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Microsoft noted improvements in search functionality.
While many users may be noticing enhancements at this point, Microsoft has yet to declare that services are fully restored.
Their latest update on X stated that “indications from telemetry remain positive” and that service availability is on the rise. Microsoft is now entering a phase of extended monitoring to ensure a comprehensive resolution.
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