Outlook, Teams, Copilot hit globally; Microsoft says attempts to fix not going ‘as expected’

A global outage affecting Microsoft's Outlook, Teams, and Copilot services has left the tech giant struggling to restore its systems. The disruption, which impacted around 430 million users of Microsoft 365 apps, primarily affected Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, was also among the affected services. Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Copilot for their operations.

Tracking platforms revealed that the outage affected 3-4 million firms using Microsoft 365. Microsoft's investigative efforts have fallen short of expectations, and the company is now exploring alternate workstreams to increase capacity amid sustained traffic management issues. Further details are available in Microsoft's 365 admin center under EX1550543 and MO1550821.

The outage began on Thursday, November 12, at around 7:40 am PT when Microsoft first reported issues with Teams in North America. Users worldwide reported problems accessing their email, loading inboxes, and sending/receiving messages. Downdetector logged over 130,000 reports of issues during the peak of the outage, although the number of complaints has since decreased.

Microsoft attributes the disruption to connectivity problems caused by elevated load across multiple regions. An issue with a process responsible for secure connections on affected servers has also been identified. This process reportedly became overwhelmed, causing some servers to stop responding to requests. Microsoft has since rolled back recent configuration changes and is working on alternative solutions to restore service. However, no indication points to a cyberattack as the cause of the disruption.