Microsoft Outlook outage enters Day 2: Why is it taking so long to fix?

The Microsoft outage affecting services such as Outlook and Teams has entered its second day, leaving users across several countries struggling to access their email and other Microsoft 365 applications. According to Microsoft the disruption was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 services that interact with its Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Users also reported problems accessing Outlook, Teams and the company's AI assistant, Copilot.

According to an earlier ETtech report, the company said several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, shifting the additional load onto the remaining infrastructure. Overnight, Microsoft began rolling back a recent network configuration change that coincided with the onset of the disruption, although it has not confirmed whether the change was the root cause.

Why is the Microsoft outage taking so long to fix?

Microsoft has not yet disclosed the precise technical cause of the outage. However, its latest service updates suggest that restoring the affected infrastructure and bringing services back to normal capacity have proved challenging. The Redmond, Washington-based company said its engineers were exploring different ways to identify the cause of the disruption and restore affected services. It described its recovery strategy as a “measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” It also assured users that it was treating the incident with urgency and priority until services were fully restored.


In its latest service health update, Microsoft said recovery efforts were ongoing across the affected infrastructure. While engineers were seeing early signs of stabilisation, service capacity had not returned to normal levels and performance remained inconsistent. "Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure. We are seeing early signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced," the statement read.

The company added: "To protect email during recovery, we’re continuing to prioritize queue and backlog processing, and the email timeout window has been extended to 48 hours to preserve delayed messages. "

Microsoft, however, dismissed any malicious activities behind the outage saying, "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete."