Malfunction at Microsoft: Outlook mailboxes cannot be reached for hours

dpa | An hour-long disruption has cut off many businesses and consumers from Microsoft's cloud offerings such as the Outlook email service. This affected a whole range of services from the Windows giant. With the office communication service Teams, for example, tasks that rely on the calendar connection could fail. The AI ​​assistant Copilot was also partially unusable for corporate customers.

Microsoft documented the fight against the outages via messages on the online platform X, which initially remained without resounding success. The software giant initially reported problems with Exchange mailboxes in the USA. The company then said that the disruption could affect users of the Microsoft 365 cloud service worldwide. They said they were trying to route data traffic past potentially problematic servers.

In the next step, Microsoft seemed to be able to report success: a process had been discovered on the affected servers that was paralyzing them. It was then said that some of the servers would be brought back online – “and they remain stable so far”. An hour later, disappointed hopes followed: the servers could freeze again as soon as data traffic reached them, Microsoft engineers reported. In the next attempt, an attempt was made to start up parts of the infrastructure in isolation, and “positive results” were seen, it was said. How long the disruption could last initially remained unclear.

Outages of online services are part of everyday life - but they are usually only short-lived. Sometimes, however, the problems are so serious or so difficult to find that disruptions occur for hours. Microsoft's email services experienced a widespread, hours-long outage at the end of August. Users were unable to log in or send and receive messages for hours. At the time, Microsoft cited a problem in the cloud infrastructure as the cause.