Microsoft suffered a relatively brief but certainly inconvenient outage on Thursday. A number of its popular productivity services went down — most notably its Microsoft 365 software, which includes Word and Excel — causing issues for U.S. employees in the middle of a workday. In addition, users reported problems accessing popular productivity apps like Teams and Outlook.

User-reported issues for Microsoft 365 surfaced on Down Detector around 2 p.m. ET, peaking at 2:30 p.m. ET. (Disclosure: Down Detector is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns Mashable.) As of about 5 p.m. ET, user-reported issues with 365 had fallen off precipitously.

Is the Microsoft outage over?

In short: Yes, it seems so. Microsoft itself confirmed the problem appeared to be resolved, though it did so in corporate speak.

"We identified that a portion of network infrastructure in North America was misconfigured, resulting in impact," read a statement from its 365 status account on X. "We’ve confirmed after a period of monitoring that rebalancing the affected traffic successfully resolved the issue and service health has recovered."

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An inability to access 365 means big problems for workers, considering it means losing Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive. It's hard to work without such key services. Reuters also noted that there were earlier reported issues with Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online, two other key work services.

Here's what you need to know about the outage.

What happened to Microsoft 365? The answer lies with Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft's issues on Thursday stemmed from a problem with Azure, the company's cloud platform. The company said there was a problem with its Azure Front Door (AFD) service, which is its content delivery network. That meant customers couldn't access some of their services.

Microsoft said that "a platform issue resulted in impact to the Azure Front Door (AFD) service. Impacted customers experienced intermittent delays or timeouts when accessing their services." Microsoft noted the issue began in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

All told, the outage was relatively short-lived. Thankfully, it's nothing like the massive 2024 Microsoft outage that was caused by CrowdStrike. It was a chaotic afternoon for some 365 users, but it all seems to be resolved hours later.

Elon Musk's electric vehicle company Tesla is once again being investigated by federal regulators.

On Thursday, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it was investigating Tesla vehicles with "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) assistance installed over traffic safety violations.

That's 2.88 million Tesla vehicles that are part of the investigation, as they all have the FSD assistance system installed.

According to the NHTSA, the agency has 58 separate reports involving traffic safety issues with Tesla vehicles that use FSD. This includes 14 crashes and 23 injuries. The traffic violations ranges from FSD-installed Tesla vehicles running through red lights to the EVs driving the wrong way against traffic during a lane change.

The NHTSA's reports include 18 complaints where a Tesla vehicle with full self-driving engaged “failed to remain stopped for the duration of a red traffic signal, failed to stop fully, or failed to accurately detect and display the correct traffic signal state in the vehicle interface.” NHTSA's reports also include six instances when a Tesla with FSD assistance engaged “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection”.

A Tesla driver in Houston told the NHTSA as part of one of its reports that Tesla's FSD "is not recognizing traffic signals." As a result, Tesla vehicles are "proceeding through red lights, and stopping at green lights."

The NHTSA will also look into how Tesla vehicles with FSD engaged perform at railroad crossings.

Tesla's full self-driving assistance system requires drivers to pay attention to the road and intervene when necessary if FSD is engaged. However, the NHTSA says that Tesla's FSD has “induced vehicle behaviour that violated traffic safety laws," as reported by The Guardian.

The NHTSA's investigation is seen as a preliminary step to a potential recall of Tesla vehicles with FSD engaged.

The NHTSA had already opened a separate investigation into Tesla and its FSD assistance system in October 2024. That investigation's focus is on how FSD performs in "reduced roadway visibility conditions." It was opened after four reported Tesla crashes with FSD engaged, one which turned out to be fatal.

The U.S. agency had also reached out to Tesla over the summer after videos showed Tesla robotaxis violating traffic laws in Austin, Texas.

Samsung is staying quiet about it for now. But its mixed-reality Galaxy XR headset, code-named Project Moohan, is expected to launch very soon. Now, one early report suggests it will match Apple's troubled Vision Pro headset in a lot of ways — and maybe even best it in others.

According to Android Headlines, the Galaxy XR's user interface will look very similar to the Vision Pro's UI: a launcher with friendly app icons arranged in a grid over whatever you're seeing. More important is how many pixels the Project Moohan device appears to be displaying, and rumor has it the headset will offer a total of 29 million pixels across both eye displays.

That's 6 million more pixels than the Vision Pro, and around 3 million more than estimated in previous Project Moohan reports — suggesting Samsung is really going to town on besting Apple. With its Snapdragon XR+ second-generation processor, the Galaxy XR headset can reportedly render more than 4K resolution — another knock on the Vision Pro, which isn't quite 4K (the resolution, in pixels per inch, is more like 3.4K.)

Both Samsung and Apple know that device weight is crucial when it comes to headsets. And Samsung seems to have done better than its California rival here, too. While the Apple Vision Pro weighs in at a minimum 600 grams — with configurations up to 650 grams — the Galaxy XR will weigh 545 grams, Android Headlines says. Both devices shave off bulk with an external battery pack.

But is that enough, in either case? As light as Samsung's mixed reality headset reportedly is, the new Meta Ray-Bans weigh one-tenth of that. Meta's decision to focus on glasses, after the lukewarm response to its VR headset-driven Metaverse, is starting to look like a signpost to other tech giants.

No wonder Apple is reportedly focused on building its own smart glasses rather than rushing out a cheaper Vision Pro. Samsung has suggested it is working on Galaxy glasses, too. Which makes one still-unknown metric about the Galaxy XR, its price, so crucial. Previous leaks put the number anywhere from $1,800 to $3,000 — again, a poke at Apple, which can't sell you a Vision Pro configuration below $3,500.

But even assuming Samsung launches Project Moohan on the low end of that estimate, we're still talking a hefty price point. For that amount of scratch, you could buy you a Meta Quest 3 ($500), a pair of the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses (also $500), and Meta's first "AI smart glasses" ($379), plus all the chargers and battery packs you'd need to keep them running all day.

Mixed reality headsets may be great devices for a specific niche (gamers, I'm looking at you). But if Apple and Samsung leadership still see as big a future for them as for the coming wave of smart glasses, they may need their eyes tested.