Several Microsoft services are down across the US, leaving Americans unable to check emails, chat with colleagues and perform other work-related tasks.
Downdetecor, a site that monitors online disruptions, shows issues began around 11am ET and are largely impacting Outlook.
Microsoft acknowledged the outage on social media, saying it identified ‘identified a potential memory management issue which may be responsible for causing impact.’
‘We’re obtaining memory dumps and logs from Outlook client telemetry data for analysis to determine our next steps,’ Microsoft 365 shared on X.
‘It’s not exclusive to Europe, neither Outlook New: have seem issues with OWA today, with loading errors or things just breaking inside the page. What seems to minimize it is to clean the browser’s cache/cookies,’ an X user commented.
Downdetector’s website shows outages across the US, including New York City, Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
Approximately 91 percent of reported problems to Downdetector cite Outlook as the main issue, followed by server connection and login.
‘Outlook being down and glitchy on a work day is crazy,’ a user posted on X.
While another shared: ‘outlook is down everybody cheer.’
Thursday’s outage is the second to hit Microsoft in a month.
The last struck around around 7:50am ET on September 12 and was not confirmed by Microsoft until 11am ET.
The company attributed the cause of the issue to ‘a change within a third-party ISP’s managed-environment.’
A third-party ISP is an online service provider that is independent from the company that hires it.
By 10am ET, more than 90,000 users reported Microsoft service outages to Downdetector, a site that tracks online service outages.
But this is probably an underestimate, as not every affected user may have submitted a report.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform also said that they investigated customer reports of a potential issue connecting Microsoft’s services from AT&T networks.
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