MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Students and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee spent much of Thursday cut off from their email and online meeting tools after a broad Microsoft failure spread across the country.
The trouble hit Microsoft 365 services used by hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. Some features came back fairly fast, but Outlook stayed offline for hours, and users lost access to mail, online meetings and AI tools for nearly the whole day.
Microsoft said it was looking into problems reaching Exchange Online mailboxes across the Americas through several connection methods, and it posted updates in its 365 admin center under incident EX1550543. The company later said its investigation pointed to failed health checks that may have started in a component that processes server health. It did not give a time for a full fix.
On campus, the outage rippled past simple messaging. Staff at the university’s Student Success Center, where many student appointments run over Teams, had to call off a number of sessions. Tutoring check-ins tracked in Excel kept working only as long as nobody refreshed the browser tab, since reloading risked losing the records.
Students said the lack of a repair estimate made the day hard to plan around, because so much of their coursework and campus business runs through Microsoft accounts.
A cybersecurity expert from Mequon said outages of this size have happened before and urged people to use strong passwords, avoid clicking unfamiliar links or messages, and report anything that looks wrong, especially as scammers often try to exploit confusion during a widespread service failure.
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