Microsoft admits only 'marginal success' as the 365 outage spreads to SharePoint and Defender

Microsoft acknowledged on Friday, November 13 that its attempts to restore Outlook, Teams and Copilot had achieved only 'marginal success', according to Al Jazeera and Euronews. Euronews reports that servers the company recovered overnight failed again when traffic returned and that Microsoft admitted its changes were 'not having the expected effect'.

According to Euronews, Microsoft's incident notice now includes SharePoint Online, used to share documents, and the security tool Defender XDR, and failures have also been reported in Planner and To Do. Al Jazeera says that on Friday the company was rolling back a network change, without saying whether that change caused the problem.

Microsoft has not published the root cause and maintains there is no indication of a cyberattack, according to both outlets. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said in Sydney that the company had told him it did not believe it was facing a cyberattack and compared it to the CrowdStrike case, an update that went wrong, according to Al Jazeera.

Euronews adds that the Singapore government and Australia's intelligence agency said they had been affected, and that OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with the tools connecting their artificial intelligence services to Microsoft 365. Al Jazeera also lists the Australian Federal Police among the affected bodies.

Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery and warns that service will return gradually as apps reconnect, according to Al Jazeera.