Its been 16 hours since I have had normal access to my M365 account especially Outlook - when will this nonsense end?

There is no confirmed public restoration ETA; for a Microsoft 365 work or school account, your administrator should use the tenant’s Exchange Online incident entry for the latest update and expected recovery status.

Check the authoritative incident update

A Microsoft 365 administrator should:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
2. Go to Health → Service health.
3. Under Active issues Microsoft is working on, open the Exchange Online or Outlook incident.
4. Review Status, User impact, All updates, and Last updated.

Microsoft uses statuses such as Restoring service and Extended recovery to indicate that corrective action is being deployed but has not yet reached every affected system. Incident updates are posted in the Service health dashboard.^1^

If the tenant shows the active Exchange Online incident matching your symptoms, affected users cannot accelerate restoration locally. Access should return automatically as Microsoft completes recovery. Reinstalling Outlook, recreating profiles, changing passwords, or repeatedly signing in is unlikely to help a server-side incident. Opening another support request generally will not make that incident resolve faster.

If you are not an administrator, ask your organization’s IT administrator for the incident ID and latest posted update.

If no matching incident appears

The administrator should select Report an issue on the Service health page. This submits the tenant’s telemetry for Microsoft to assess and places the report under Reported issues.^1^

For a business-critical outage that is not listed:

1. In the admin center, select Help & support.
2. Describe the Outlook/Exchange Online outage and its scope.
3. Select Contact Support.
4. Choose phone or email and include:
   • When access stopped, including time zone
   • Whether Outlook desktop, web, and mobile all fail
   • Number of affected users
   • Exact error text and correlation/request IDs, with personal data removed
   • Business impact

This requires an administrator. If every subscription was purchased through a Microsoft partner, contact that partner instead.^2^

If this is a personal Outlook.com account

The Microsoft 365 tenant dashboard applies to work or school accounts. For an Outlook.com, Hotmail, or Live.com mailbox, use Microsoft’s public Service Health Status page; Microsoft Support directs Outlook.com users there for access problems.^3^

The available public information does not establish that an AI-written configuration change caused this outage, so that should not be treated as the confirmed root cause unless Microsoft publishes it in the incident details or post-incident report.

References

1. How to check Microsoft 365 service health
2. Get support for Microsoft 365 for business
3. Fixes or workarounds for recent issues on Outlook.com | Microsoft Support