Microsoft 365 outage affects hundreds of thousands globally

Microsoft has reported a global outage impacting hundreds of thousands of users across its Microsoft 365 business products. The service disruption, which has persisted for over 12 hours at the time of writing, has affected various applications such as Outlook, Copilot, Teams, 365 Education, admin functionalities, and Defender security tools.

According to Downdetector, a popular outage-tracking site, the issues have particularly affected Exchange, Excel, and login functionalities, with disruptions spanning 74 countries. Reports originating from Ireland peaked around 6:00pm on November 12th, with the count exceeding 500 as of the publication time.

Microsoft attributed the issue to unexpected server unavailability across multiple regions, which has placed strain on its remaining infrastructure. The company stated, "As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident." They are continuing to monitor the situation and have observed marginal success.

Major organizations including OpenAI, New Zealand's foreign ministry, Australia's intelligence agency, federal police, and various government offices across the US and Japan have been impacted by the ongoing incident. While this is not the first major cloud service outage of the year, it underscores the critical role that Microsoft and other tech giants play in modern digital infrastructure.