By Abby Rathburn | Staff Writer
Early Thursday afternoon, a widespread outage hit Microsoft 365 platforms, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The outage specifically affected Baylor students and faculty, as the university relies heavily on Microsoft 365 for daily operations and campus-wide communication.
While all M365 platforms appear to be experiencing issues, Outlook errors appear to be the central issue for Baylor students. According to the outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook around noon.
Amid campus disruption, Baylor University spokesperson Lori Fogelman said Baylor ITS is observing Microsoft’s progress as it works to restore access.
“The massive Microsoft outage affecting Exchange Online and several Microsoft 365 services across the nation has impacted email and physical phones on campus,” the statement reads. “Microsoft is actively working to resolve the issue, and Baylor ITS is closely monitoring their progress.”
Minneapolis sophomore Will Gadtke said the outage has directly impacted his line of communication for his work at a local hedge fund.
“For my boss, we’re looking to send out a report we’re working on … hopefully it can get up soon,” Gadtke said.
Gadtke wasn’t the only student left waiting on the servers to recover, as the outage affected routine coursework.
“On a daily basis, I use Outlook for checking emails, specifically school,” Missouri City senior Stephany Mwaura said. “I also use Word a lot, and PowerPoint.”
After last semester’s Canvas outage, many are reflecting on whether we rely too heavily on technology.
Middletown, Delaware, sophomore Aarav Chitti said that, although he believes this is a one-time occurrence, the best way to prevent these issues in the future is to have a backup plan in place.
“We could use maybe BearWeb or a similar platform, and we could use something like a Gmail that we have on file, rather than specifically our Outlook email,” Chitti said. “I think that there’s other options that are similar to that to accommodate us.”
However, some of these alternatives may raise privacy concerns.
“Given how much personal information students may actually be comfortable sharing, it might also just be a reality that we need to be prepared for a D-Day where we don’t have communications for a short period of time, and we need to be able to work around that, Chitti said.”
Given the rarity of outages, Gadtke said he hopes Baylor continues to use M365 platforms, as he’s had a positive experience with them so far.
“Throughout my time at Baylor, I’ve loved Outlook. I think it’s been good, but it’s a bit annoying right now,” Gadtke said. “If I’m trying to reach someone and the only way to do that is through Outlook, that can be a problem, but I think it’s a great system to use.”
For more updates, check https://systemstatus.baylor.edu/.
