Microsoft 365 outage leaves users worldwide without Outlook, Teams or Copilot

Microsoft confirmed on Thursday, November 12 a disruption that prevented customers from connecting to several Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR, according to BleepingComputer, citing advisory MO1550821 in the company's admin center. The incident began at 13:26 US Eastern time, 19:26 in peninsular Spain, and although the first problems were detected in the Americas, Microsoft later confirmed that users in any region could be affected.

According to the same outlet, Microsoft first attributed the problem to elevated infrastructure load, but then explained on X that the load was not driven by an increase in traffic but by a number of servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable, which strained the rest. The company said it had paused all deployments, redistributed connection traffic and restarted the affected servers.

In its update at 18:57 Eastern time, 00:57 on Friday in peninsular Spain, Microsoft reported "limited recovery" after returning some of the servers to service, and warned that recovery would be gradual. Earlier it had found that a core process on those servers was becoming overwhelmed and was investigating whether reverting some recent configuration changes would speed up recovery, again according to BleepingComputer. The Verge also reported that Outlook was still down on Thursday.

The same Thursday, between 9:45 and 10:53 Eastern time, a separate Teams incident affected users in North and South America. Microsoft has not said whether the two are related.

As of the latest update consulted, Microsoft had not confirmed when all services would be fully restored nor detailed the underlying cause of the server failures.