Microsoft Identifies Cause of Extended Outlook Outage

On Saturday evening, numerous users reported difficulties accessing the Outlook email application, with Microsoft later confirming the outage. The disruption not only affected Outlook but also other applications within the Microsoft 365 suite. According to reports on outage monitoring platform 'allestörungen', the issues persisted for approximately two hours, from around 9:30 PM to 11:30 PM.

The affected applications included Microsoft Teams, with many users taking to social media to voice their frustrations primarily regarding Outlook. The outage was not confined to Germany; reports from U.S. media indicated similar problems in major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, with increased outage reports likely due to higher population density in these areas.

In response to the growing concerns, Microsoft quickly acknowledged the situation in a post on X (formerly Twitter), indicating that many users were unable to access various Outlook services and features. The company undertook an analysis of user logs and telemetry data, which led them to identify the root cause of the issue shortly thereafter.

The problem stemmed from a problematic code that was deployed during a recent update. Microsoft successfully rolled back this code, and by around midnight local time, all services were reportedly restored to normal functionality.

This outage comes at a challenging time for Microsoft 365 users, who have recently experienced a significant price increase of 30% for subscriptions. The new pricing structure includes features such as Copilot and AI image editing capabilities. However, existing customers do have an option to revert to earlier subscription models, such as Microsoft 365 Single Classic and Microsoft 365 Family Classic, which maintain previous pricing and service levels.