• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Microsoft Outlook users were hit with a massive outage on Thursday afternoon. 

The issue was quickly resolved, but seemed pretty intense for a time, hitting a peak around 3 p.m. ET.  

Microsoft reported that a “portion of network infrastructure in North America was misconfigured, resulting in impact." 

Microsoft 365 itself was down, affecting Outlook email. But teams, Azure and the Microsoft Store were also affected, with thousands of reports coming in to Downdetector, according to some reports.   

The effect on marketers is not yet clear. But it can't help. 

This is just one of several outages to hit Outlook over the past few months. 

On September 11, Microsoft said: “We’re investigating a system outage affecting Outlook users across North America, which has now been resolved," adding that it "caused users not to be able to access emails and calendars via any Exchange Online connection method.”

And on July 11, Computerworld reported: “Microsoft’s Outlook service suffered a massive global disruption on Wednesday, leaving millions of users unable to access email through Outlook.com, Outlook for desktop, and Outlook mobile.”

This seems to be part of a pattern.

"There have been many service disruptions in recent months, exposing persistent fault lines," Computerworld wrote. "In June, a global outage disrupted core applications of Microsoft 365 services, which included Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online.

In May, Outlook suffered another outage, which was attributed to a change that caused the problem. Earlier, in March, another outage incident disrupted Outlook, Teams, Excel, and more, impacting over 37,000 users.”

Computerworld added that other companies were also affected by outages. But Microsoft has been standing out. 

Comments on Downdetector give some idea of yesterday’s experience:

• Our whole office is down in Atlanta
• in Chicagoland, outlook not opening. Wanting to open in safemode
• still down in Los Angeles we can receive emails but cannot send out emails to anyone outside of our network 
• still down in Northern Virginia 

But the situation improved as Microsoft corrected the problem, as shown in comments:

• Back up in Atlanta 
• Back on in Houston 
• Miami is back online