FACTS
A Microsoft 365 outage that began Thursday, Nov. 12, cut off access to Outlook email for users around the world and disrupted Teams and Copilot, according to Al Jazeera. On Friday, Microsoft apologized and said a bug introduced during a network capacity upgrade caused the problem, Fox Business reported. Microsoft said it was restoring service to remaining customers and regions in stages.
When the Microsoft 365 outage began
Users began reporting that they could not reach Outlook at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, which is 11 a.m. Eastern time, Al Jazeera reported. Within about an hour, the outage-tracking site Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. Around 07:00 GMT on Friday, Downdetector showed at least 43,000 reports of Outlook problems from users in 72 countries, according to Al Jazeera.
Microsoft first said it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes” in the Americas, and later said the issue “may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region,” ABC News reported.
What Microsoft said caused it
On Thursday, Microsoft said some of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load across multiple regions” due to a “number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable,” according to ABC News. The company said it had “paused all deployments” and was “restarting affected servers.”
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X that “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Al Jazeera reported.
On Friday, Microsoft said the incident began with a problem during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change, according to NBC Chicago and the Associated Press. Fox Business reported that Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack and interference from AI agents, and said a full root-cause report will follow an internal review.
The apology and recovery
Microsoft posted its apology on X at 10:40 a.m. Central time on Friday. “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” the company said, according to NBC Chicago and the Associated Press.
Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying issue and was restoring service gradually, checking stability at each stage, and that some customers may still see intermittent problems, NBC Chicago reported. Fox Business reported that Microsoft extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so that delayed messages can still reach recipients until at least Saturday afternoon.
Who was affected
Fox Business reported that the outage affected Outlook email and calendars, Copilot, recently used files in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and external file sharing in SharePoint Online. Teams chats and calls largely kept working, according to Al Jazeera, and Microsoft said Thursday that “mitigative actions have successfully restored service health and functionality” for Teams, ABC News reported.
Government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted, and communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines were affected, Al Jazeera reported. In Australia, the national spy agency and federal police were among the organizations affected. New York City Emergency Management warned of possible delays in email and online city services that rely on Microsoft systems, according to ABC News.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported problems with customer support email, and Air India temporarily rerouted its email, Fox Business reported. Anthropic and OpenAI said Friday afternoon that problems with their Microsoft 365 integrations were easing, according to Fox Business.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to Microsoft’s website, NBC Chicago reported. Al Jazeera noted that Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours in January and that Outlook users worldwide were locked out in late August.
More coverage is in the Stay Current News Tech section.
Photo: File photo of Building 92 at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
