Microsoft Outage Becomes an 'Adult Snow Day' Online: Outlook Reports Top 130,000 as Workers Joke About the Break
Microsoft 365 went down worldwide on Thursday, November 12, knocking out Outlook email and other services for hours, and American workers promptly turned the outage into a running joke across X, Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Instagram, with one user calling it a snow day for adults. According to USA TODAY on November 12, reports of Outlook problems on Downdetector peaked at 130,000 just after 1 p.m. Eastern, and the number of people affected went well beyond those who filed reports.
A self-described computer nerd posting as Abduco wrote on X, "take your time, take your time... no rush, the downtime is nice!" The post drew nearly 60,000 views, and another user replied, "Agreed. Don't rush a bad fix. Make sure it's right. Test it for a few days," adding a Four Day Weekend hashtag. Another user offered the standard IT advice: "Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
On Bluesky, Southwestern Law School professor Tiffany C. Li described the situation as "like a snow day for adults." New York City content creator Layla Taremi posted a video on Facebook declaring, "oh noooo there's an outlook and microsoft outage what on earth will we do!?!?" On Threads, a user named Lisa, who describes herself as a higher education professional, posted, "I'm just a girl, standing in front of Outlook, begging it to not come back online before 5pm."
For some, the outage did not go far enough. A Threads user posting as jrperiod wrote, "Whoever took down Outlook, you forgot to take down Teams as well. Do the job right or don't do it at all." Others joked about refreshing their inboxes over and over, pairing the posts with waiting-for-email GIFs.
As GSM reported earlier, Microsoft said a large number of its servers became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks, and the company said there was no indication the outage was caused by a cyberattack. Affected services included Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR. By Thursday evening, some servers had returned to service and were remaining stable, but Microsoft had not declared the incident over and had not published a full explanation.
Source: USA TODAY
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
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