Microsoft reported a widespread outage Thursday morning, affecting the Stanford community’s access to tools such as Outlook, Copilot and Microsoft 365.
The outage, which began at 9:54 a.m., impacted over 130,000 users worldwide, according to Downdetector, a company that collects user reports on service issues.
Microsoft did not identify the cause of the outage in their original statement. At 10:35 a.m. PT, the company announced the issue was the result of a portion of their infrastructure experiencing an elevated load across multiple regions. The University sent a Community Advisory notice at around 12 p.m. informing affiliates about the situation.
Stanford uses Microsoft and its email service, Outlook, as its primary provider. As a result, many students, faculty and staff were unable to access or communicate through their email.
“It’s just been really inconvenient,” Amber Tran ’29 said. “I tried to reach out to a professor over Outlook, and then I just thought there was something really wrong with my Wi-Fi, because that happens at Stanford often, and then I realized it was down for everyone.”
Some community members began receiving emails from Outlook again at around 10:00 p.m. Stanford students rely heavily on Outlook as a way to communicate with professors, clubs and stay up to date on assignments, according to Matthew Buckhout ’29.
“It’s a little concerning, because one of my teachers said he would email me something to do right after I did this presentation, and I’ve just been wondering, ‘Where is that email?’ and obviously it’s not here,” Buckhout said.
According to several students, the outage made them realize how dependent they are on email.
“We’re so reliant and we don’t even realize it,” Aanika Tangirala ’29 said.
Students Neel Ahuja ’29 and Diego Sanchez ’29 felt that this situation is an indicator that the University should switch to a different email platform. Both of them expressed annoyance with Outlook’s login system and would prefer a shift to Google Workspaces.
The Daily reached out to the University for comment.
It is unclear when the issue will be resolved, although Microsoft is attempting to find a solution. “We’re continuing our efforts to improve server stability to improve traffic flow … We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments,” Microsoft announced on X at 8:36 p.m.