Microsoft faces massive outage: Outlook, Xbox services affected, company responds; What we know so far

Microsoft Outlook outage: Tens of thousands of Microsoft 365 customers complained on Saturday that they were having issues with services like Outlook.

Users posted screenshots and complained that services like Outlook were crashing and they were being logged out of their email accounts.

Xbox services, which are also owned by Microsoft, were also facing issues, some users said on social media.

“Even using the Authenticator app for Outlook results in an error message due to the current outage,” a user posted on X.

“Had to change my password 3 times until I checked on #x that #outlook is down. Wth @Microsoft,” another said.

According to a report by CNN, the complaints of the outage started as early as 3:30 pm ET with users reporting issues on DownDetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage reports on the website for Microsoft 365, especially Outlook, peaked at around 4 pm ET with approximately 37,000 complaints, the media outlet said.

Thereafter, the Microsoft outage reports dropped off and some users said that services had been restored for them.

“I thought I was getting my outlook hacked, turns out the entire Microsoft platform is getting hacked. Thank God it’s not personal,” an X user posted.

Some users even pointed out that Microsoft service status website showed that everything was alright, despite thousands of users complaining about the Outlook outage.

“What’s the point of these Microsoft service status pages if they show the wrong status when the entire world is tweeting about Outlook being down,” a user said.

Microsoft responds

In a series of posts on X, Microsoft said that it was “investigating an issue” that may have affected its users.

“We’re investigating an issue in which users may be unable to access Outlook features and services.”

An hour later, the company said that it had identified a potential reason for the Microsoft Outlook outage.

“We’ve identified a potential cause of impact and have reverted the suspected code to alleviate impact. We’re monitoring telemetry to confirm recovery.,” it said.

It later said that its telemetry indicates that a “majority of impacted services are recovering following our change”.

In a separate post, Microsoft said that the Outlook outage came after a problematic code change, adding that services were restored now.

“Following our reversion of the problematic code change, we’ve monitored service telemetry and worked with previously impacted users to confirm that service is restored”.

Earlier this week, communications platform Slack also saw an outage that left thousands of users unable to use the service.