Microsoft’s massive Outlook and Teams outage has lasted for hours

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CNN
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Microsoft said Monday that it has identified the cause of a major Outlook and Teams outage and is implementing a fix for the problem.

From 12:00 PM ET Monday, outage tracking site Down detector showed more than 5,000 user-reported issues, although this data does not fully reflect the extent of the outage.

“We have begun implementing a fix, which is currently progressing through the affected environment. While this is progressing, we are beginning manual reboots on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” said the company on X earlier in the day.

Around noon, the company said the fix had reached “approximately 98% of affected environments”, although reports of Downdetector continued to increase. It can take time for updates to work their way into customers’ systems.

But Microsoft then noticed those reboots “proceeded slower than expected for most affected users” and did not yet provide an estimated time for a fix.

However, the outcome has hindered many office workers some US users on X celebrated the little break ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Technical outages have had serious consequences around the world this year, although Microsoft’s case is not as widespread by comparison. In what has been called the largest IT outage in history, CrowdStrike’s software problem over the summer grounded flights, disrupted hospitals and cost Fortune 500 companies more than $5 billion in direct losses.

This is a development story. It will be updated.