Microsoft 365 outage drags on, but things are improving

Microsoft's multi-day outage affecting Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 services has entered its second day, with the company still struggling to fully resolve the issue. The problem began on Monday after an issue with the Exchange Online service caused email delays, authentication issues, and other problems for some Outlook users. As of Tuesday, Microsoft's latest update on X indicated that mitigation actions were still in progress, though not at the level of complete resolution.

While Outlook received the majority of attention, other services like SharePoint, Copilot, Teams, Purview, Defender XDR, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Universal Print were also affected. The company attributed the issue to a misconfiguration affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services, which prevented authentication components from deploying as expected on a portion of its infrastructure.

Microsoft conducted a review of recent changes that could have led to the problem, then implemented various mitigations to try to provide relief to end users. While Outlook users should see gradual recovery of mail flow by 10 p.m. ET on Monday, search functionality remained degraded. By 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Microsoft reported improvements in search functionality.

Microsoft has not officially declared its service fully back to normal, but its latest X post indicated that telemetry showed positive indications and that service availability is improving. The company is now entering a period of extended monitoring to ensure a full resolution.