Several Microsoft programs including Outlook experienced outages Saturday afternoon
At the height of the issue, tens of thousands of users reported problems to an outage-tracking website
While Microsoft stopped short of calling it an outage, the company confirmed it was aware of a problem
“We’re investigating an issue in which users may be unable to access Outlook features and services,” Microsoft said in a series of posts on X
The company said it reviewed “telemetry and customer provided logs,” and later that it had “identified a potential cause of impact.”
Microsoft said it reverted coding it thought was behind the issue, and confirmed service had been restored by 7 p.m., about three hours after customers first noted the outage
Earlier in the day, users took to social media to say they could not access their Outlook email accounts
According to the third-party site Downdetector, were been more than 4,000 flagged reports in Canada by 4:11 p.m. EST. Globally, CNN reported that tens of thousands lost access to Microsoft 365 programs including Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Word
CNN reported some users were having issues with Xbox services as well
Earlier this week, communications platform Slack experienced a similar outage that left thousands of users unable to access the service
