Topline
Microsoft has said a fix has been deployed to restore email and calendar services to thousands of users who reported outages early Monday morning, but when exactly the programs will come back online is still unclear.
The Microsoft Teams logo.
Key Facts
More than 2,100 people had reported issues with Microsoft 365 on the website Down Detector as of 10:30 a.m. EST on Monday, with 86% of reports coming from issues with Outlook, 9% with Exchange and 6% with Sharepoint.
A post to the Microsoft 365 account on X, formerly known as Twitter, said most users were having issues accessing Exchange Online—a cloud-based email server—and Microsoft Teams calendars.
Microsoft said it had started to deploy a fix as of 9 a.m.—shortly after reports of issues started spiking significantly—which includes “manual restarts on a subset of machines that are in an unhealthy state,” but did not give an estimated time for full restoration.
The company added that a “recent change” was likely responsible for the outage and that the change has been reverted.
While Microsoft did not specify what change impacted programs, Monday morning was also the rollout of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders that is meant to take regular snapshots of computer activity—essentially a “photographic memory” for computers—to store on PCs and make searchable later without remembering exact keywords or dates.
The feature first debuted in May but its initial version was criticized for privacy and security concerns, leading the full launch to be postponed.
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Big Number
320 million. That’s how many people use Microsoft Teams monthly, according to the company.
Key Background
Outlook and Teams are part of Microsoft 365, the family of software and cloud-based services used by millions of companies worldwide. Microsoft Teams is a collaborative software for chatting, scheduling and video calls between employees.
Forbes Valuation
Microsoft is listed at No. 8 on Forbes’ index of the world’s most valuable companies. The company, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, hit a $3 trillion valuation in January, the second-ever company to do so. Shares were trading just over $415 on Monday morning—down about 0.3% despite a nearly 0.5% gain for the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Gates is the 15th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $106.5 billion.