Microsoft struggles to get M365 services back online after widespread outage
If you’re struggling to send or receive emails, you’re not alone. Microsoft has been unable to fully restore Microsoft 365 more than 13 hours after an Exchange Online failure took down Outlook and spread to Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and parts of the company’s security tooling, and it said overnight that its latest fixes were “not taking as expected.” The outage began at 16:17 UTC on Nov. 12,…
Microsoft's Microsoft 365 services have been experiencing significant issues since an Exchange Online failure began at 16:17 UTC on November 12. Users were unable to send or receive emails, access Outlook on the web, desktop Outlook, or use mobile clients and the REST API. The outage quickly expanded, affecting Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot, Defender XDR, Intune, Power BI, and several Purview services.
Microsoft has been investigating the issue, which appears to be caused by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, causing a surge in outbound calls from routing services to backend servers. The company is scaling virtual machines to add capacity and reduce the load, and has identified a process responsible for establishing secure connections as a contributing factor.
Microsoft is preparing a configuration change to address the behaviour, testing it on a subset of servers before wider deployment. The incident has highlighted the risks of consolidating various functions, such as email, collaboration, and security, within a single cloud ecosystem, with enterprises needing to have a rehearsed fallback plan for critical services.
Written by urgent.news from Computerworld's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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