• by Ray Schultz , October 8, 2020

Microsoft is facing ongoing outages, with reports peaking around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, according to downdetector, and continuing into Thursday afternoon.  

“My outlook email is not working today,” writes one user in a downdetector post dated roughly 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. “This beginning to be way beyond annoying. Please fix our problems.”

“Still down in Chicago,” writes another in the same time frame. 

On Wednesday, Microsoft tweeted: "We're investigating an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 services. Users may see impact to Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook.com."

The map shows severe problems for Outlook in the Northeastern U.S., Southern California and the Chicago/Midwest area.  

Of the complaints coming in, 56% concerned log-in, 31% involved receiving messages and 13% were related to websites. 

Last week, Microsoft 365 users suffered a massive outage on Monday, affecting Outlook, Azure, Microsoft Teams and other services. Another outage followed on Thursday. 

The latest problems began on Wednesday afternoon, when “users took to Twitter and other social channels to report they were unable to access Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook.com, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business,” ZDNet reports.  

By 4 p.m., services had begun to recover, although there still were residual issues, ZDNet says.