Microsoft Outlook outage drags into Alaska's afternoon as fixes fall short

Microsoft's outage of Outlook email, Teams and other work tools was still going Thursday afternoon, hours into Alaska's workday.

The University of Alaska warned its users at 9:44 am that Microsoft was looking into a problem keeping people out of their Outlook mailboxes.

By 1:11 pm, Microsoft said its fixes so far "have not provided the anticipated relief." It hasn't given a time for a full fix.

The State of Alaska runs its email on Microsoft, according to the state IT office's service catalog. The catalog lists a target of 99.99% uptime for state email, or about 53 minutes down a year. It wasn't clear Thursday how many state workers were affected.

If your email is down, the university said desktop programs like Word and Excel seemed to be working. Web versions and syncing might not be.

To see whether it's fixed, check Microsoft's status page or its Microsoft 365 Status account on X. The next update is due by 2:30 pm Alaska time. Workplace IT staff can find more detail in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Health, then Service health, according to Microsoft's instructions. The university says it will update its page every three hours.

Microsoft says a large number of its servers unexpectedly stopped working, putting extra strain on the rest. It's now testing a fix on part of its system, restarting it and slowly bringing traffic back before trying the same thing more widely. It's also weighing keeping traffic within each region, so each one can recover on its own.

Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, Planner and To Do may also be affected, Microsoft says.