A significant Microsoft outage is disrupting global access to essential services such as Outlook, Teams and Exchange Online, leaving businesses, government agencies and individual users struggling to cope. The outage has escalated from early Monday morning, with more than 5,000 users reporting problems on Downdetector by the afternoon. While Microsoft is reporting progress on remediation at the time of writing, widespread issues remain.

About twelve hours ago, the company acknowledged the issue, stating that “we are investigating an issue impacting users attempting to access Exchange Online or functionality within the Microsoft Teams calendar. Please refer to MO941162 in the admin center for more information.”

Teams, Outlook, Exchange, SharePoint: all affected

The outage has affected the calendar functionality of Microsoft Teams, Outlook email services, Exchange Online and SharePoint – tools that are essential to the workflows of millions of people, BleepingComputer reports. Major urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tampa are experiencing notable service disruptions. While some users report partial functionality, such as receiving emails without the ability to download attachments, others remain completely offline.

This disruption has a cascading effect for companies. Team meetings are postponed, project timelines are disrupted, and employees must find alternative methods of communication. In a world increasingly reliant on digital tools for productivity, interruptions like these underscore how reliant we have become on seamless cloud services.

Cause and response from Microsoft

According to Microsoft, a recent system change caused the outage. The company has taken a two-pronged approach to address the problem. A global rollout of a comprehensive solution and manual restart of affected machines to expedite service restoration. Although Microsoft claims that more than 90% of affected environments have received the fix, user reports indicate ongoing issues.

This is an ongoing story. Updates will be provided as more information becomes available.