Microsoft Outlook and the company's Exchange service is back online after an outage that began today around 6:30 am eastern.
"On Tuesday, June 24th, 2014, at approximately 6:30 AM EDT, some North American customers experienced email delays with Exchange Online," said a Microsoft spokesman. "The issue has since been resolved and the service is now functioning normally."
The outage lasted approximately 12 hours and affected businesses nationwide. For detailed coverage on the outage, see below:
If you're struggling to send emails today, you're not alone.
Microsoft Outlook isn't working for some businesses nationwide, according to The Washington Post and ZDNet (amongst others).
Although Microsoft Outlook isn't as popular among consumers, it's still huge in the enterprise.
And the enterprise is big for Microsoft, too. The company derives over half of its revenue from business clients. Without functioning email, many of those businesses have come grinding to a halt.
Microsoft has reached out to angry users via Twitter:
Some Exchange customers are experiencing email delays, we are working to resolve, please see the SHD for service status
— Office 365 (@Office365) June 24, 2014
The problem is also being hashed out on this Office 365 message board.
"Microsoft has identified an issue in which a portion of capacity responsible for facilitating connectivity to the Exchange Online service has entered into a degraded state," said a Microsoft support rep. "Engineers are actively working on a solution to remediate impact."
Microsoft knows Exchange is broken and they're working on a fix. But that may not be enough to quell angry users who took to Twitter to vent:
Microsoft Outlook has been down all morning! grrrrrrr
— aquesst (@aquesst) June 24, 2014
Couldn't have been a worse day for #Microsoft#Outlook to go down.
— John Kreuzer (@KreuzersKorner) June 24, 2014
Outlook 365 emails have been down almost all day at my day job. This is just plain embarrassing, @Microsoft. http://t.co/FGk8d9U3Yt
— Matt Hoffman (@mattjhoffm) June 24, 2014
This outage comes as Microsoft Lync, an online communications tool, was down on Monday.
Microsoft released the following statement to Business Insider:
"Some Exchange customers are experiencing email delays. Our engineering team is actively working to resolve this issue. We recommend customers visit the service health dashboard for real-time updates."