Microsoft scrambles ‘aggressively’ as widespread outage hits Outlook, Teams, and Copilot worldwide

Washington, Nov 13 - Microsoft experienced a widespread outage across its Outlook, Teams, and Copilot services globally on Thursday, affecting tens of thousands of users worldwide. The company attributed the issue to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The disruption extended across the US workday, impacting 74 countries and territories, with users in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa reporting issues.

Initially thought to be limited to the Americas, Microsoft later confirmed the issue affected Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region. Microsoft 365, the company’s cloud-based subscription service, includes applications such as Outlook and Teams. Microsoft paused all deployments, diverted traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restarted affected servers to restore service.

Around 130,000 users in the US reported Outlook issues shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT), with the number of reports declining to about 37,000 by 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT). Thousands also reported problems with Teams and Copilot. Despite ongoing efforts to restore full service, Microsoft disclosed limited recovery progress, stating users might experience a gradual return as their clients reconnected to the restored servers.