A major Microsoft 365 outage that knocked out Outlook email and other workplace tools around the world on Thursday was still not fixed on Friday morning, with Microsoft reporting only “marginal success” from its recovery efforts and giving no time for full restoration. The Microsoft 365 outage has now run for more than 18 hours, disrupting businesses, schools and government agencies across the globe.
Problems began on Thursday, November 12, shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern time, when Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services went down for many users. Microsoft’s own incident record puts the start of the Exchange Online incident, tracked as EX1550543, at 11:17 a.m. Eastern, earlier than first reported. A second incident, MO1550821, covers multiple Microsoft 365 services. At the peak, around 6 p.m. on Thursday, almost 140,000 people in 74 countries reported Outlook problems to the tracking site Downdetector, according to BBC News.
What Is Down, and What Still Works
Outlook and email-linked Microsoft 365 features remain disrupted. Users may be unable to load inboxes, or may see delays, in the Outlook website, the desktop app and on mobile. Teams calendars, scheduling and creating new chats can fail, along with Copilot, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Defender, Planner, To Do, Intune and Purview. Not everything is down: in Teams, most core features still work, including joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages, and files stored directly in SharePoint can still be opened.
Microsoft said it had “no indication of a cyber attack” and is “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”. Its explanation is that a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which put strain on the rest of its infrastructure, and that a “traffic influx” is complicating recovery. Several fixes brought only partial recovery, and the outage carried on through the night. Microsoft has said users may see a gradual recovery as their apps reconnect, and has extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to preserve delayed messages. This is the third big Microsoft 365 outage this year, after ones in January and August. The company will publish a post-incident report once the problem is fully resolved. Read our earlier report on Microsoft’s security fixes here: https://reportrig.com/microsoft-fixes-1093-flaws-including-exploited-outlook-zero-day/
