Outlook: cloudy with a chance of chaos

TL;DR: If your inbox has felt oddly calm since yesterday, it’s (unfortunately) probably not because you got ahead on your tasks. Microsoft is still scrambling to fix a global outage that knocked a range of 365 services offline (including Outlook and Copilot). Some workers have found a hilariously foolproof workaround—but for businesses, schools, and governments that run on Microsoft, the outage is turning out to be less like a snow day and more like a fire alarm.

What happened: Here’s Microsoft’s explanation: Some of its servers got overwhelmed and stopped responding, and the remaining ones buckled under the extra load. Microsoft said it’s rolling back a recent network change that lines up with when the issues started, and that the incident is technical and “not related to cyber or AI / agents.” After several attempts at fixes, Outlook finally started working again this morning, and Microsoft is seeing “encouraging recovery progress” across regions and services (though some users may still see delays).

Fax to the future: The outage reached users in at least 74 countries and territories, disrupting vital services around the world and forcing many offices to go old-school. Several UK police forces and New York City’s emergency management office told people to call instead, citing delays with online services and emails. Meanwhile, some of Japan’s government services switched to paper (one ’90s office staple is suddenly back in demand), and some Australian schools couldn’t hold online classes. One think tank estimates the outage cost at least $7 billion in lost productivity.

Déjà vu: This is far from Microsoft 365’s first major service interruption this year. There was a roughly 10-hour blackout in January, a half-day US network failure in July, and a multi-day outage in late August. Part of the problem is how Microsoft’s services are built: Outlook, Teams, and Copilot rely on the same email system behind the scenes, so when it breaks, a lot can break with it.

Bottom line: Even if your inbox survived or wasn’t affected (hi, fellow Gmail users), Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million business subscriptions, so odds are your doctor’s office or your local government wasn’t so lucky. If your email did go down, savor the quiet while it lasts, because your backed-up messages could be about to hit all at once. —LC