A widespread Microsoft outage on March 1 left tens of hundreds of customers unable to entry key providers, together with Outlook, Groups, and Workplace 365, for greater than three hours. Microsoft has not offered full particulars on the basis trigger however attributed the disruption to a “problematic code change.”

Timeline of the Microsoft outage

In response to Downdetector, studies of points started rising on March 1 round 3:30 p.m. ET. Greater than 37,000 complaints have been logged for Outlook, 24,000 for Workplace 365, and 150 for Groups. Nearly all of studies originated in U.S. cities, together with New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, although social media posts indicated the outage had a world attain.

Annoyed customers turned to social media, with many initially fearing they’d been hacked. “I assumed I used to be getting my outlook hacked, seems all the Microsoft platform is getting hacked. Thank God it’s not private,” one person posted on X.

Microsoft acknowledged the problem in a publish on March 1at 4:34 p.m. ET by way of its Microsoft 365 Standing account, stating: “We’re investigating a problem during which customers could also be unable to entry Outlook options and providers.”

SEE: Microsoft Patches Two Actively Exploited Zero-Day Flaws

Nonetheless, the outage affected extra than simply Outlook; Workplace 365 purposes comparable to Phrase, Excel, Groups, and Alternate have been additionally impacted. In a follow-up X publish, Microsoft confirmed that “numerous Microsoft 365 providers” have been down and that engineers have been analyzing telemetry and customer-provided logs.

At about 5:00 p.m. ET on March 1, Microsoft confirmed it had recognized a possible explanation for affect, and nearly an hour later reported that providers have been recovering. The corporate confirmed at 7:02 p.m. ET that service had been restored after “reversion of the problematic code change” and to “confer with MO1020913 within the admin heart for detailed info.”

Customers categorical frustration as companies face potential losses

Regardless of the repair, some customers continued to report points. At 1:46 a.m. ET on March 3, the “Standing Is Down” X account reported ongoing Outlook and Workplace 365 disruptions.

One affected buyer posted on X on March 3 that Microsoft “must be ashamed of themselves” and that the continued issues are “probably costing companies tens of millions of {dollars}.”

The corporate’s service standing web page reveals all providers as operational on the time of writing.

Microsoft has but to launch an in depth report on the newest outages. roosho has contacted Microsoft about the reason for the preliminary outage and for added details about any ongoing points; there was no reply on the time of writing.

Different outages that disrupted enterprise operations

Microsoft is, sadly, no stranger to outages. In November 2024, Microsoft Groups skilled technical delays for over 24 hours, and since then there have been points with Copilot, Multi-Issue Authentication, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

In July 2024, a distributed-denial-of-service assault brought about international points with Azure cloud service. Nonetheless, none of those come anyplace near the size of the CrowdStrike incident that very same month, which disabled about 8.5 million Home windows units worldwide and brought about big disruption to emergency providers, airports, legislation enforcement, and different crucial organisations.

Slack’s latest outage

Microsoft 365 providers have been additionally not the one ones going through issues this week. On Feb. 26, Slack skilled a important outage, disrupting providers like messaging and workflows for hundreds of customers worldwide. This was brought on by upkeep motion in a database system which led to an “overload of heavy site visitors.”