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Microsoft experienced a major global outage on Thursday, November 12, disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services. The disruption continued into Friday, affecting businesses, government agencies and users across several regions.
The outage began during the afternoon in the United States and spread across international markets. At its peak, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook, while users also reported difficulties accessing Microsoft 365 applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive.
Many users could not open their email inboxes, send or receive messages, or connect reliably to Microsoft’s cloud-based services. The disruption also affected some organisations that depend on Microsoft systems for internal communication and daily operations.
Microsoft traced the problem to infrastructure failures involving Exchange Online, the cloud service that supports Outlook email, calendars and related functions. The company said parts of its infrastructure were experiencing unusually high loads, while several servers had become unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks.
The failure placed additional pressure on the remaining operational servers, making it difficult for Microsoft to restore normal service. Attempts to restart affected servers and redirect traffic produced only limited improvements, as some restored systems became unresponsive when users began reconnecting.
Microsoft said it had not found evidence that malicious activity or a cyberattack caused the disruption. However, the company had not confirmed the precise technical trigger behind the server failures as recovery efforts continued.
The outage also affected Microsoft connectors used by artificial intelligence platforms. OpenAI reported problems with new connections to Microsoft services, while Anthropic identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Government agencies and businesses in several countries experienced disruptions. Singapore’s government technology agency reported problems with government email services, while Japan said the incident had affected government IT infrastructure. Australia’s federal agencies were also among the organisations affected.
Airlines and financial companies reported varying levels of disruption. India’s IndiGo said problems with its email support services affected its ability to receive customer enquiries, although its other support channels and flight operations remained available. Air India said its flights were unaffected and that it had temporarily redirected email services to maintain customer communication.
Some businesses also had to adjust their operations. US industrial technology company Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the disruption.
By Friday, Microsoft had reported partial recovery in some affected regions, but its engineers were still working to restore the remaining infrastructure. The company said some of the changes it had applied were not producing the expected results and that it was examining alternative ways to improve capacity and stabilise its systems.
The incident has renewed concerns about the dependence of businesses and public institutions on a small number of major cloud and productivity service providers. When a widely used platform experiences a prolonged disruption, the effects can spread beyond individual applications to organisations that rely on its infrastructure for communication, administration and business operations.
The outage also followed another disruption involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in October, adding to questions about the reliability of services used by millions of people and organisations worldwide.
