Microsoft has suffered a widespread global outage that disrupted entry to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and different Microsoft 365 services, affecting companies, authorities establishments and colleges throughout a number of international locations.
The disruption started round noon on Thursday, November 12, within the United States and prolonged into Friday, leaving customers unable to entry electronic mail accounts, ship and obtain messages and use different cloud-based office services.
Microsoft mentioned it was working to revive the affected infrastructure after figuring out issues with server availability and an overwhelmed course of on the affected servers.
Microsoft outage impacts companies and authorities establishments
The disruption affected a number of Microsoft 365 services, together with Outlook, Teams, Copilot and SharePoint.
Services that depend on Exchange Online, Microsoft’s electronic mail platform, have been significantly affected, though some options that don’t rely upon it remained purposeful.
- The scale of the disruption was mirrored in reviews recorded by Downdetector, which displays service interruptions.
- The platform recorded greater than 130,000 reviews of issues with Outlook on the peak of the outage within the United States, though the determine represents consumer reviews slightly than a confirmed rely of affected prospects.
- The outage was reported throughout a number of international locations, affecting companies, authorities businesses and academic establishments.
- In Australia, some companies have been unable to print invoices, whereas some colleges couldn’t maintain on-line courses. Court livestreams have been additionally affected, and colleges requested dad and mom to report pupil absences by cellphone.
The influence prolonged to different industries. According to Reuters, electronic mail help services utilized by Indian airways IndiGo and Akasa Air have been affected, whereas some monetary corporations in Taiwan skilled disruptions to fund administration actions.
The outage additionally affected Microsoft connectors utilized by OpenAI and Anthropic, disrupting their integration with Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft struggles to revive affected servers
Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure masses throughout a number of areas. It later clarified that the elevated load was not brought on by a common rise in visitors however by a lot of servers changing into unexpectedly unavailable, shifting demand onto the remaining infrastructure.
- Further investigation discovered {that a} core course of on the affected servers was changing into overwhelmed, inflicting the servers to cease responding and contributing to capability loss.
- The firm tried to scale back the influence by pausing deployments, shifting visitors away from affected infrastructure and restarting servers.
- However, some servers turned unresponsive once more after visitors was redirected to them, complicating the restoration course of.
Microsoft later reported that some affected servers had been returned to service and remained steady, whereas visitors was being redirected by different pathways the place doable.
However, the corporate mentioned these measures had not delivered sustained restoration and that it was contemplating further actions to enhance infrastructure stability.
Microsoft mentioned it was not conscious of any malicious exercise inflicting the disruption, whereas Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke mentioned the corporate didn’t imagine it was coping with a cyberattack.
Previous outages expose companies’ reliance on cloud services
The newest disruption will not be the primary time outages affecting main know-how infrastructure suppliers have interrupted enterprise operations globally.
In November 2025, Nairametrics reported that a major Cloudflare outage disrupted millions of websites globally, together with Nigerian web sites and digital services. The incident uncovered the extent to which companies and on-line platforms rely upon a comparatively small variety of web infrastructure suppliers.
