• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, October 2, 2020

Microsoft may say that Outlook is working again after a global outage that lasted several hours on Thursday. But this reporter has been unable to use the email service on Friday — it simply doesn’t load. 

Maybe it's my computer. But I’m apparently not alone — downdetector shows minor problems continuing to affect the Northeastern U.S., the West Coast, and Northern Europe. 

This has been the second Microsoft failure in a week. 

Microsoft 365 users suffered a massive outage on Monday, affecting Outlook, Azure, Microsoft Teams and other services. 

The Thursday problem was worse, judging by media reports.  

Think of all those commercial emails that never made it into inboxes. 

Here’s the Twitter narrative of how Microsoft handled the problem. If nothing else, it shows how the team worked through the night: 

We've received reports of users experiencing issues accessing their Exchange Online accounts via Outlook on the Web. Our initial investigation indicates that India-based users are the primarily impacted audience. 

2:03 a.m., Oct 1

We’ve collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols. Additionally, we’ve identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide.

2:49 a.m., Oct. 1

We’re reviewing recent changes to our service to further determine the cause of impact. Users may experience problems with various Exchange Online protocols including Outlook desktop, mobile devices as well as those dependent on REST functionality.

3:52 a.m, Oct. 1 

We've determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of impact. We've reverted the update and are monitoring the service for recovery.

5:34 a.m., Oct. 1

Rollback has mitigated impact for the affected features in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams (SI#MO223247). For impact to the Exchange service (SI# EX223208), majority of the users are seeing recovery and we’re taking measures to ensure full recovery for all our users worldwide. 

6:46 a.m., Oct. 1

After additional monitoring of the service health, we've confirmed that the issue is resolved.

11:47 p.m., Oct. 1

Well, maybe not quite. 

UPDATE: I was able to get back into Outlook on Friday evening, and it works like a charm. I'm now trying desperately to catch up with an inbox full of emails.