A global Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and other services on Thursday, November 12, and Friday, November 13. The incident affected businesses and government agencies worldwide. Microsoft said an unexpected loss of server availability caused the trouble. Many users got stuck as they could not access essential workplace applications and files.
A global Microsoft outage has disrupted Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Copilot and several other services across multiple countries, affecting businesses, government agencies and third-party platforms.
A widespread Microsoft outage that began on Thursday, November 12, continued into Friday, November 13, disrupting several services across the US, India, Australia, Japan and other countries. The impact included customers being unable to access Microsoft's email, workplace applications, cloud services and AI applications.
Microsoft acknowledged the incident and said an unexpected loss of server availability had put additional pressure on its remaining infrastructure. The outages were not limited to Outlook or Microsoft Teams but also impacted security applications, enterprise management applications and third-party applications reliant on Microsoft's cloud services, according to the company's service health advisories. During the outage, Downdetector saw over 130,000 reports of issues with Outlook.
Full list of Microsoft services affected by the outage
According to Microsoft's service health updates, several products experienced disruptions across different categories.
Email and productivity: Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft 365, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Email connectivity and being unable to access files and workplace applications were reported by users.
Communication and collaboration: Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online & OneDrive. The problems reported were chat failures, calendar, scheduling and accessing cloud storage.
Artificial intelligence: Microsoft Copilot was impacted, and users had trouble loading Copilot Chat and getting access to workplace information. Other providers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, also reported issues with their Microsoft connectors.
Security and enterprise management: Microsoft Defender XDR, Defender for Office 365, Intune, Purview, Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center had problems related to security, device management and administrative functions.
Other Microsoft services: Microsoft Planner, To Do, Power BI, Fabric, Graph, Universal Print, Windows 365 and Microsoft 365 Education also reported disruptions affecting various features and operations.
Third-party websites and organisations affected
The outage also impacted organisations that depend on Microsoft's infrastructure.
OpenAI reported problems with new Microsoft connector connections and certain tools. Anthropic found another upstream provider problem with its Microsoft 365 connector.
The school administration platform, School Bytes, used by schools in New South Wales, was disrupted in Australia. Government departments, including Australia's federal police and intelligence agencies, also reported email issues.
The US House of Representatives confirmed it was impacted; it stated engineers were working with Microsoft. Meanwhile, electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter financial results announcement from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruption caused by the outage.
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft said it was caused by a significant number of servers suddenly going down. Additionally, some servers were restored and then started receiving traffic, causing some to become unresponsive and adding strain to the other infrastructure, the company said.
Microsoft engineers started looking at diagnostic data and traffic management and rebuilt compromised servers with earlier software configuration. Microsoft was not convinced it was a cyber attack, Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said. However, the precise technical cause had not been established.
When will Microsoft services be fully restored?
Microsoft has begun the recovery of services, but progress has been uneven as of Friday, November 13. As traffic returned to some of those revived servers, they were beginning to slow down once more, the company said.
Microsoft was trying to restore infrastructure capacity and progressively reconnect impacted users. It warned services may take time to return to normal as applications re-established their connections.