What Happened?
As you’ve likely already seen, Microsoft is experiencing outages across a number of its services, including Outlook and Teams. While initial fears may have been that this was caused by a cyberattack, Microsoft has confirmed that this is not the case and has attributed it to an “elevated load” on its infrastructure. The company has pledged to publish full details of the root cause once the issues are fixed.
While the level of access to these services varies from customer to customer, many are reporting being unable to send or receive email, access certain files, or communicate using Teams.
What Has Microsoft Said?
In its latest service update, Microsoft expressed optimism about a fix for the ongoing outage, saying, “We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.” The company also reported “positive results” after applying a patch to 365. This is welcome news after an earlier statement in which it noted that initial attempts to create a fix were “not taking as expected.”
The timeout for emails has also been extended to 48 hours as a result of the disruption, in an effort to preserve delayed messages during the outage.
Microsoft is encouraging users to stay extra vigilant against bad actors attempting to use the outage as an opportunity to send out phishing attempts, fake password resets, and fraudulent messages. The company urges anyone experiencing these to report anything they come across.
