Several Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and Exchange Online, have been experiencing a widespread outage since Thursday. The disruption has now entered its second day, affecting businesses, government agencies, and other organizations across the world. Microsoft has been trying to restore its services for several hours now, but a complete fix is yet to arrive.
According to Microsoft’s incident reports, the problems with Exchange Online began at around 11:17 a.m. ET on November 12, followed by a broader Microsoft 365 outage at 1:26 p.m. ET. The company has since acknowledged the problems and posted several updates on its recovery efforts.
It’s not just Outlook that’s affected
Outlook and Exchange Online have been among the worst affected services, with users reporting problems accessing mailboxes, sending emails, and receiving messages. Microsoft Teams is also facing issues, mostly with its calendar and meeting scheduling features. The main messaging and calling functions, however, continue to work for many users.
The outage is also affecting Microsoft 365 Copilot, where some users are unable to access chats or retrieve information. Other affected services include SharePoint Online, Microsoft Defender XDR, Intune, Planner, and To Do.
Microsoft has also listed Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, and Microsoft 365 for the web among the consumer services that could be affected. Not all features in these apps are unavailable, though, and the extent of the disruption varies.
Microsoft is making progress, but there’s no ETA yet
Microsoft initially suspected an unusually high amount of traffic was causing the problems. However, further investigation found that several backend servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, leaving the remaining servers struggling to handle the load.
The company tried restarting some of the affected servers, but they became unresponsive again once traffic was restored. Microsoft has since deployed a patch targeting an authentication and routing component, which appears to be helping.
In its latest detailed update, Microsoft said it was seeing early signs of recovery, although server capacity was still below normal. Engineers are continuing to restore traffic and bring more servers online. The company has also extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to prevent delayed messages from being lost. Microsoft says there is no indication of malicious activity behind the outage. As of that update, the company had yet to provide an estimated time for full restoration.
