Microsoft was still struggling Friday, November 13, to restore its cloud services following a widespread outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications across multiple continents, affecting businesses, government agencies and millions of users.
The disruption began Thursday, November 12, at approximately 11:17 a.m. Eastern Time, when users began reporting widespread difficulties accessing email accounts and other Microsoft service. The problems quickly spread beyond the United States, affecting organizations in Europe, Asia and Australia.
At the height of the disruption, Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports involving Outlook in the United States. Although the number of complaints subsequently declined, the company continued to report significant service interruptions more than 18 hours after the incident began.
Microsoft identifies technical problem but full recovery remains elusive
In its latest official update Friday, Microsoft reported early signs of stabilization following attempts to restore affected servers and modify network traffic. However, the company acknowledged that overall service capacity had not returned to normal and that some systems continued to experience intermittent failures.
According to Microsoft’s service-health reports, engineers identified a process responsible for establishing secure connections that became overwhelmed, causing affected servers to stop processing requests. Initial attempts to restart the infrastructure were unsuccessful because some servers became unresponsive again when traffic was restored.
The company subsequently introduced additional measures, including redirecting network traffic, restarting affected systems in stages and reversing a recent network configuration change that coincided with the beginning of the incident.
In an update issued at approximately 9 a.m. GMT Friday, Microsoft said recovery efforts were continuing and that engineers were carefully reintroducing traffic while monitoring server performance. The company also extended the email timeout window to 48 hours in an effort to preserve delayed messages during the recovery process.
Earlier, Microsoft had reported positive results from restarting portions of its infrastructure, but warned that the improvements were not yet consistent across all regions. The company said it had found no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
The problems affected Exchange Online, Outlook, Copilot, Microsoft Defender, SharePoint and several administrative tools. Some Teams functions, particularly calendars and meeting scheduling, were also disrupted, although core messaging and video meetings remained largely operational.
Businesses and governments affected across several continents
The outage had significant consequences for organizations dependent on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. According to the Associated Press, government agencies and businesses in the United States, Australia, Japan and other countries reported difficulties accessing essential digital services.
Australian authorities confirmed disruptions affecting government operations, while Japan’s government acknowledged problems involving its information technology systems. Airlines, including Air India and IndiGo, also reported interruptions to Microsoft-based services but indicated that flight operations were not affected.
The disruption extended to artificial intelligence platforms that rely on Microsoft’s infrastructure. Services connected to Microsoft 365, including integrations used by OpenAI and Anthropic, experienced problems accessing emails, calendars and other workplace data.
Technology publication Computerworld reported that the outage also affected security services, including Microsoft Defender’s Safe Links feature, which helps protect users from malicious websites and suspicious email links. Administrative tools and document-sharing functions were also affected in some organizations.
The incident has renewed concerns about the dependence of businesses and public institutions on a limited number of global cloud providers. A failure involving a central service such as Exchange Online can affect numerous applications simultaneously, interrupting communications, administrative operations and access to corporate information.
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