Microsoft Suffers Widespread Outlook Outage Due to Faulty Code Update
On March 19, 2025, Microsoft experienced a major outage that disrupted Outlook on the web services, preventing thousands of users from accessing their accounts and essential communication tools. The company attributed the issue to a problematic code change in a recent update.
The outage began early Wednesday afternoon, with users reporting difficulties logging into Outlook, accessing the website, and encountering server connection errors.
According to DownDetector, a platform that monitors service disruptions, thousands of complaints flooded in within hours of the incident.
Microsoft’s 365 Status team acknowledged the problem on their official X (formerly Twitter) account, stating:
“We’re investigating reports of an issue affecting users’ ability to access Outlook on the web.”
The company also directed affected users to the admin center for updates under the incident reference EX1036356.
As investigations continued, Microsoft pinpointed a faulty portion of code as the root cause of the disruption.
“We’ve identified a portion of code that is throwing an error. We’re working to revert the recent code change and reviewing data from the reproduction to determine any additional next steps,” the company announced.
To resolve the issue, Microsoft initiated a rollback of the problematic update, a standard approach that has proven effective in past outages.
“We identified a recent change made to a portion of Outlook on the web infrastructure that may have resulted in impact. We’re reverting the change to remediate the issue and closely monitoring,” Microsoft confirmed.
This outage is the latest in a series of service disruptions affecting Microsoft’s cloud-based services in recent months.
Earlier in March 2025, a similar issue involving a code change caused disruptions to Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services.
After several hours of troubleshooting, Microsoft confirmed that the rollback was successful and that the issue was resolved for all users.
“We successfully reverted the change and confirmed that the impact is resolved for all users. For more information, please refer to EX1036356 in the admin center,” the company stated in its final update.
As Microsoft continues to analyze the incident, users and IT administrators are advised to stay updated through official Microsoft channels and report any lingering issues.
This event highlights the challenges of maintaining cloud-based services and the potential impact of software updates on global users.
