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Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts UW-Milwaukee Campus for Hours
A widespread Microsoft 365 outage knocked out Outlook, Teams, and other services at UW-Milwaukee on Thursday, forcing canceled meetings and workarounds as students and staff coped without email and collaboration tools. Microsoft said a server health-check component was likely to blame but offered no repair timeline.
A major Microsoft 365 outage disrupted communications at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Thursday, leaving students and staff unable to access email, online meetings, and other cloud-based tools for much of the day.
The outage affected Microsoft services nationwide, with Outlook remaining down for hours even as some other functions were restored. At UW-Milwaukee, the impact was felt across campus operations.
"Not able to do my regular things," said John Carlo Mariano, a graduate student at UW-Milwaukee. "Haven't been able to send emails or even just be able to look at a lot of things. A lot of things are connected to Microsoft, so it's just been pretty hard."
Grayson Zahner, a student who works at the UW Student Success Center, said the disruption forced staff to cancel a number of meetings with students that were scheduled to take place on Teams. Tutoring services recorded in Excel also required careful handling.
"When we were recording those today, we had to make sure not to reload the tab, otherwise we wouldn't be able to record people's information to check them in for the appointments," Zahner said.
Microsoft acknowledged the outage in statements posted on X, saying it was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact" and that its investigation indicated "the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health." The company did not provide an estimated repair time, leaving users uncertain for hours.
"It makes a lot of things really uncertain," Zahner said.
Alex Holden, a cyber expert based in Mequon, said the cause was not immediately clear.
"We are experiencing a huge outage within Microsoft infrastructure and more specifically within their Microsoft 365 products," Holden said. "Microsoft is making a number of statements saying that it's a technology problem. It's affecting specific regions and they're trying to restore services."
Holden noted that large-scale outages have occurred before and encouraged people to practice good cybersecurity hygiene, including using strong passwords, avoiding suspicious links and messages, and reporting anything that appears unusual.
The outage highlights the reliance of universities and businesses on a handful of cloud providers, where a single technical failure can ripple across email, scheduling, and remote collaboration for thousands of users. For UW-Milwaukee, the disruption meant a day of improvised workarounds and postponed appointments as the campus waited for services to return.