Four human beings are currently circling the Moon. They’re traveling at thousands of miles per hour, surrounded by the vacuum of space, armed with the most sophisticated technology humanity has ever built. Their mission: fly around the Moon and come back.

What could possibly go wrong?

“I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those is working.”

There it is. The most quintessentially human moment of the entire Artemis II mission. Not the launch. Not the lunar flyby. Not the fact that we’re back in lunar orbit for the first time in fifty years. No — the real milestone is watching astronauts realize that Microsoft Outlook is equally broken whether you’re on Earth or 240,000 miles away from the nearest IT helpdesk.

The Call to Houston

I desperately wish I was there when this went down. You know Houston’s mission control is staffed by people who have dealt with this exact same problem a thousand times in conference rooms across corporate America. “Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on?” “Is your internet working?” “Did you install a pending update?”

The commander — Reid Wiseman, if you’re keeping track — reportedly saw two Outlook instances running on the display. TWO. As if one broken Outlook isn’t enough, the universe said “let’s give them the full Microsoft experience.” Neither one worked. I’m told there’s some kind of anomaly, but I’ve seen this exact behavior on my work laptop every Monday morning for the last six years, so I’m hesitant to call it an “anomaly” rather than just standard Microsoft behavior.

Think about what this means. NASA spent billions on the Space Launch System. The Orion capsule has actual toilets now, an insane upgrade from the Apollo era when astronauts had to shit in plastic bags. They’ve got life support systems, radiation shielding, a navigation system that can guide them around the Moon and back. And the thing that actually breaks? Outlook.

This Is the Most Relatable Thing in Space History

The internet, obviously, lost its collective mind. Within hours, the clip was everywhere. “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those is working” is now the most human sentence ever uttered in space. It surpasses Neil Armstrong’s moon landing speech. It surpasses “one small step.” We’re going to put this on the Voyager golden record. This is our greeting to alien civilizations: “hi, we’re the humans, and our email client doesn’t work even when we’re 240,000 miles from home.”

Every developer, every IT person, every corporate drone who has ever screamed at their screen while Outlook spins forever loading has been vindicated. NASA gets it now. They finally get it. You sit in a meeting room, you try to open your calendar, you watch the loading circle spin, you watch it die, you restart, you watch it die again — and that’s on Earth. In space, at least you have an excuse. The signal delay alone is probably 1.3 seconds each way, which is somehow still faster than Outlook on a good day.

How the Hell Does Outlook Even Work in Space?

This is genuinely a question I have. The Artemis II capsule connects to Earth’s networks through NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system. They’ve got bandwidth up there, apparently. The astronauts can email, they can video call, they can apparently tweet from space if they wanted to — I think some astronaut did that a while back and everyone lost their minds.

But Outlook? Outlook is apparently some specially configured version, or maybe it’s just standard Outlook being run on whatever operating system the Orion capsules use. And look, I’m not going to pretend I know the technical details — but I know that when Outlook breaks, the usual fix is to reinstall, which takes an hour, or to just give up and check your email on your phone, which is what every sensible person does anyway.

The astronauts, presumably, do not have this option. They’re up there with a broken Outlook and no easy way to fix it. No restarting the router. No calling the IT guy. Just them and two broken Outlook instances, floating in the void.

Microsoft Has Entered the Chat

Microsoft, to their credit, hasn’t commented yet. They probably won’t. Why would they? It’s not like they can claim this is a user error — the user is literally an astronaut, and if anyone knows how to follow instructions, it’s someone who trained for years to sit in a controlled explosion and go to space. If Outlook breaks for an astronaut, Outlook breaks for everyone, and that includes every manager who ever told me “have you tried checking your Outlook calendar?” when I told them I didn’t get their meeting invite.

Actually, hold on — maybe this is Microsoft’s fault. Maybe they pushed a bad update. We all know that feeling. You wake up, you turn on your computer, Outlook has updated overnight, and now everything looks slightly different and nothing works the way it did before, and there’s a new “helpful” Copilot button that does nothing useful, and your emails are loading slower than they were before, and you’re just sitting there wondering why Microsoft keeps shipping features nobody asked for instead of fixing the thing where your emails randomly disappear for six hours and then come back in a random order.

Or maybe NASA is running an old version. Maybe they haven’t updated in months. Maybe they’re on some LTS build from 2021. In which case, welcome to the club — everyone in corporate America is running some ancient Outlook version because IT won’t let them update.

This Is What Unites Us as a Species

We can argue about politics. We can debate which programming language is best. We can fight about tabs versus spaces, Vim versus Emacs, GitHub versus GitLab. But there is one universal truth that transcends all of human civilization: Outlook is broken, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on Earth or in lunar orbit. It doesn’t matter if you’re a software engineer or an astronaut. Microsoft Outlook is going to let you down in exactly the same way, at exactly the worst possible time, and you’re going to have to call someone for help.

The commander of Artemis II just proved what we’ve always known: email is broken, Outlook is a mystery, and at the end of the day, we’re all just people trying to check our inbox while the universe doesn’t give a shit about our problems.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go restart my Outlook for the third time today.