Microsoft Outlook outage: What happened?

A Microsoft outage on Monday has affected Outlook and Teams users. Microsoft is aware of the issue and working on a fix, but said it's "facing delays in our recovery efforts."

Reports of issues began around 8 a.m. ET and spiked around 12:30 p.m. ET, according to DownDetector (which shares a parent company with Mashable). Reported outages have since tapered off, suggesting the issue might be resolved soon.

The Microsoft 365 account on X said, "We’ve identified a recent change which we believe has resulted in impact." It's unclear what specifically caused the outage besides mention of a recent change. But Microsoft's controversial AI-powered Recall feature was launched today for Windows Insiders in preview mode. Big deployments like Recall, which takes incremental snapshots of a user's screen, are sometimes the culprit for causing mass outages.

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Users took to X to express their frustration at not being able to access basic tools like Outlook for sending emails and Teams for video calls.

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Others didn't seem to mind the multi-hour outage on the Monday before Thanksgiving when they would otherwise be working.

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The outage seems to be on its way to resolution, but we will share updates if that's not the case.