Was your office impacted when Microsoft's Outlook went down Monday?

If you tried to get some work done Monday and Outlook suddenly decided it wanted nothing to do with you, you were definitely not alone.

Microsoft’s Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services experienced a widespread outage Monday, leaving thousands of users unable to send, receive or even search their email.

Downdetector reports showed more than 6,000 complaints about Outlook at the height of the outage. The problems began around late morning, with users reporting everything from authentication errors to delayed or failed emails.

And it wasn't just Outlook. Microsoft said the problem also affected services including OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Teams, Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Defender XDR.

Microsoft eventually identified a problem with a core authentication configuration- which is basically the system responsible for recognizing and authenticating users across multiple Microsoft 365 services,

By Monday night, Microsoft was reportedly restarting the malfunctioning infrastructure, but warned that "users could still experience delays, including a backlog of emails working their way through the system."

ChatGPT Goes Down Too

And apparently one giant technology outage wasn't enough for a Monday, ChatGPT Work was also experiencing its own partial outage. OpenAI said users on multiple plans were having trouble starting or continuing tasks. That issue was declared fully recovered Monday night.

There is no indication that the Microsoft and OpenAI outages were connected.

One Downdetector user apparently decided to embrace the technological apocalypse, writing that their company was now distributing stamps and envelopes while the office printer worked overtime.