Microsoft Outage: Outlook, Teams And Copilot Disrupted As Thousands Report Problems Worldwide

Microsoft users across several countries faced widespread disruptions on Thursday, November 12, after an outage affected Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and the company's AI assistant Copilot, leaving thousands unable to access emails and workplace applications. Reports of problems with Outlook peaked at nearly 130,000 on outage-tracking website Downdetector shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time, while Microsoft 365 recorded more than 47,000 reports. Microsoft said parts of its infrastructure were experiencing elevated load across multiple regions and that it was working to restore affected servers.

The disruption, initially reported in the Americas, was subsequently confirmed by Microsoft as potentially affecting users in any region. Users reported difficulties opening inboxes, sending and receiving emails and connecting to other Microsoft services. The outage also affected certain connections used by OpenAI and Anthropic's AI services, highlighting the wider impact of the disruption across platforms that rely on Microsoft's infrastructure.

Microsoft Works To Restore Services As Outage Reports Surge

Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of users experiencing problems accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. It later confirmed that the issue could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity in other regions. The company attributed the disruption to elevated load on parts of its infrastructure, which it said was contributing to connectivity errors.

In updates posted on its Microsoft 365 Status account, the company said it had paused deployments, begun shifting traffic away from affected infrastructure and was restarting servers to restore services. Microsoft also said some servers had become unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks. It was testing an alternative method of checking server health and preparing automated recovery systems to identify and restart unresponsive servers.

The disruption continued for several hours despite the restoration efforts. At around 6 pm Eastern Time, Microsoft said it was observing limited recovery and that a portion of affected servers had begun returning to service. The company cautioned that users might experience a gradual restoration as their applications reconnected to the network. Downdetector reports subsequently declined from their earlier peaks, although thousands of users continued reporting problems.

OpenAI, Anthropic Connectors Also Affected By Microsoft Disruption

The outage extended beyond Microsoft's own products. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its Microsoft connectors, with new connections potentially failing and some tools not working as expected. Anthropic also reported an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. The disruptions demonstrated how problems with a major cloud and productivity infrastructure provider can affect services operated by other technology companies. OpenAI, Anthropic Connectors Also Affected By Microsoft Disruption

The outage extended beyond Microsoft's own products. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its Microsoft connectors, with new connections potentially failing and some tools not working as expected. Anthropic also reported an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. The disruptions demonstrated how problems with a major cloud and productivity infrastructure provider can affect services operated by other technology companies.

Microsoft 365 is the company's subscription-based productivity platform, bringing together services including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive. Outlook is widely used for email and calendar management, while Teams supports workplace communication and online meetings. An interruption to these services can affect businesses and organisations that rely on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure for everyday operations.

The outage also renewed attention on the reliability of Microsoft's cloud services. The company experienced another major disruption involving its Azure cloud platform in October, which affected several Microsoft products and services across industries. While Microsoft worked to restore access on Thursday, the latest incident underscored the dependence of businesses and digital services on a relatively small number of large technology infrastructure providers.