A major global outage of Microsoft’s Outlook email service has left many office workers unable to send or receive work emails as usual. Some scrambled to find alternatives, while others worried about delays to their work. But another group of social media users had a different plea for Microsoft: do not rush to fix it. “Ideally, give us all some peace until next Monday!”
Outlook suffered a major outage from about 1pm US Eastern time on Thursday (12 November), or 2am on Friday in Singapore, leaving tens of thousands of users worldwide unable to send or receive emails as usual. Workplace communications platform Microsoft Teams was also affected.
Some sharp-eyed social media users noticed that the outage coincided with the arrival of Friday the 13th in Asia, joking that the supposedly unlucky day might be to blame.
For some office workers, however, the sudden disruption was a pleasant surprise. With emails inaccessible and work at a standstill, many took to social media to express “concern” for Microsoft engineers’ health, urging them not to work too hard and to take their time with the repairs.
One user wrote: “To the Microsoft employees working hard to get Outlook back up and running, please don’t push yourselves too hard. Your health matters more than any work deadline. Why not enjoy a proper long weekend, relax and come back refreshed next Monday? You’ve worked hard enough this week. I promise those 400 unread emails aren’t going anywhere.”
Another joked: “Dear Microsoft, there’s no rush. Take your time. Spend more time with your family. Mental health comes first. Happy Friday, everyone!”
Many others appealed to Microsoft on behalf of “all workers”: “Microsoft, please take all the time you need!”
Of course, not every office worker was quite so “lucky”. Email systems at some companies continued to function normally, leaving employees envious of others: “Why is Outlook down for the whole world, but working perfectly fine at my company?”
In Singapore, email services at several government ministries and agencies were affected. In response to queries from Lianhe Zaobao on Friday, a Government Technology Agency spokesperson confirmed that the Microsoft service outage had affected some government systems, including email services. The authorities were working with Microsoft to restore services as soon as possible.
