‘Problematic code change’ to blame for Microsoft outage, company says

In this Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012, file photo, a new Microsoft Corp. logo, left, is seen on an exterior wall of a new Microsoft store inside the Prudential Center mall, in Boston. (AP / Steven Senne)

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.