Microsoft 364: If you can’t restore Outlook, can you run my agentic AI business apps?

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 apps including Teams, SharePoint and Calendar remain down as a Thursday outage extended into Friday.

Based on Microsoft's status updates, the company is now closer to bringing these enterprise applications back than it was 12 hours ago.

The latest update goes like this, but the reactions on X are more amusing.

"We've made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region. Traffic is being gradually restored, and we're seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.

Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency.

Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.

At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete."

In other words, Microsoft will eventually tell us it suffered the mother of all DNS configuration screwups.

The outage on Thursday was bad enough that it was a subject repeatedly overheard on the commute home from New York City. At least I learned a bit of Spanish since my error message wasn’t in English.

At first, I didn't miss Outlook or Calendar since they are in many respects nuisance apps. I'm not going to miss email for 12 hours. Now Microsoft 365 is the annoyance and the software giant needs to extend credits and deliver a whopper of a postmortem.

Simply put, the Microsoft 365 debacle is a bad look when Ignite is around the corner and the company has to pitch enterprises that it should be running your AI agents. If you can't keep Outlook running handing over my agentic business applications may be a tough sell for CxOs.