Microsoft 365 might be minus 1 and down to Microsoft 364 after a major outage on Thursday caused several apps to be unavailable for hours.

As reported by CNBC and others, the outage began shortly before 1 pm ET and impacted Microsoft 365 services, Outlook and Teams. At the time, about 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook.

Amazon Web Services and Google users also reported outages on the site.

Microsoft initially said infrastructure “elevated load across multiple regions” was responsible for the connectivity problems.

The company later determined that the elevated load was caused by a “number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure” and that some servers were failing automated health checks.

“We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service,” Microsoft wrote.

As I’m writing this Thursday night at 9:30pm CT, many services are still down. From a personal standpoint, the last email I received via Outlook was at 12:13pm CT this afternoon. I suspect many of you didn’t receive the afternoon post from this blog via your Outlook feeds (which means you may not see this one either). I write blog posts on Word, and they can be saved locally, but updates are not being synced with OneDrive because of the outage.

I’m sure that many of you have been in the same boat this Thursday. After all, according to this report, there are over 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial seats. A whole lot of many of you, that is.

The latest update (9:13pm CT) on the Microsoft 365 Status account on X is as follows:

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://msft.it/6013xBHsf if the admin center is not available to you.”

Not exactly promising.

Of course, the jokes are everywhere. Microsoft 365 might be minus 1 and down to Microsoft 364 after Thursday.

Hopefully, by the time you read this Friday morning, the issues will be resolved. Then again, it is Friday the 13th, so who knows? 😉 Regardless, this outage should remind us that any service – even one as ubiquitous as Microsoft 365 – are not 100% reliable all the time. There are no guarantees for any organization. Even Microsoft can have a bad day. Still not as bad as the day Nvidia had. 🤣

So, what do you think? Did Thursday’s M365 disruption affect you? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “robot lawyer wearing a T-shirt that says ‘364’ on it and tearing November 12 out of a daily calendar”.

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