Hyderabad: A global outage affecting Microsoft's services, including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, has disrupted access to several Microsoft 365 applications, leaving businesses and users in multiple countries facing connectivity problems.
The disruption primarily affected services dependent on Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email and calendar platform. Users reported difficulties accessing Outlook inboxes, sending and receiving emails and loading certain applications. Some features of Teams, SharePoint, Planner and other Microsoft 365 services were also affected, although not all functions stopped working.
Microsoft is working to restore normal operations but said its recovery efforts were not progressing as expected. The company said its latest fixes continued to face difficulties as it attempted to manage traffic and restore the capacity of affected servers.
"Current actions we are taking include scaling up virtual machines to increase capacity and reduce load. Additionally, we're querying for machines in a bad state to perform a force sync for our recent network change, which may improve service availability," Microsoft said.
The company also reported that some affected machines remained in a faulty state, preventing recent changes from syncing as intended. It said it would continue monitoring the effectiveness of its recovery measures and make further adjustments to improve service availability.
Downdetector recorded more than 138,000 reports of Outlook problems at the peak of the disruption in the US. These figures represent user-submitted complaints and do not indicate the actual number of affected customers. The outage also affected third-party services that rely on Microsoft's infrastructure.
The widespread disruption began on Thursday, November 12, with users reporting problems accessing Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft initially reported issues affecting users in the Americas before warning that the disruption could affect connectivity in any region.
The outage extended to Australia, where some government services and public institutions experienced disruptions. Service NSW, the government service portal for New South Wales, advised customers to delay visits to its service centres. Some hospitals and healthcare institutions also reported administrative difficulties, although these were not reported to have affected patient care.
The disruption also affected services that rely on Microsoft's infrastructure. OpenAI reported problems with its Microsoft connectors, which could prevent new connections and cause some tools to malfunction. Anthropic also identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft said affected servers were failing automated health checks, making them unavailable and placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure. The company also identified an issue involving a process responsible for establishing secure connections on affected servers. It was investigating whether a recent configuration change had contributed to the disruption.
Microsoft said it had found no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. It had begun restoring some affected servers and redirecting traffic to alternative infrastructure, but warned that recovery could take time.
The company has not provided a timeline for the complete restoration of its services.