Microsoft Restores Outlook and Teams After Nearly 24-Hour Outage
Microsoft 365 is mostly back after a nearly 24-hour outage that hit Outlook, Teams and Copilot. What caused it, who was affected and why emails may arrive late.
Microsoft says its 365 services are largely working again after an outage of nearly 24 hours that locked people out of Outlook email and parts of Teams and Copilot. The company’s status page still warned on Friday that some services may be unavailable for some customers.
Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack and says AI agents played no part. According to the company, a problem introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade surfaced after a more recent network change.
How the outage spread
Trouble began on Thursday afternoon, Eastern time. Wired reports that users started flagging Outlook problems on the tracking site Downdetector just after 12 pm ET, while MacRumors puts the start at approximately 1 p.m. Eastern. Within the hour Microsoft said it was looking into reports that, at first, came only from North America. According to Wired, the disruption soon reached more than 70 countries.
By 2:15PM ET, Engadget staff reported that many of them could not load Microsoft’s service status page at all. Those who could saw a list of potentially affected services: Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR. The notice referred to Business and Enterprise plans, but individual users were hit too.
Around 5PM ET the list grew to include Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Microsoft Purview, with problems also noted in Power BI and the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center. That evening Microsoft wrote that a core process on the affected servers was getting overwhelmed, which made the servers stop responding, and that its fixes so far had not brought the expected relief.
What stopped working, and what kept running
According to MacRumors, the main casualty was Outlook email. People who use an Exchange account inside Apple Mail were affected as well. Most calling, meeting and messaging features in Teams stayed up, though some users got errors when scheduling meetings or adding calendar entries.
The effects reached far past office inboxes. Wired reports that governments from Japan to the United States saw disruptions, airlines had trouble contacting customers, many law enforcement and emergency services came to a halt, and hospitals reported widespread interruptions.
What it means for your inbox
Microsoft said it had raised the email queue time to 48 hours so that messages sent during the outage still get delivered. In practice, mail that seemed lost on Thursday may turn up late, all at once.
Independent researcher Jonathan Leitschuh told Wired that people should expect a burst of notifications as services return. He added that, even with most systems restored, another wave could arrive hours later as smaller subsystems come back online one by one.
By the morning of Nov. 13 (an update posted at 9:09am ET), Microsoft said on X that recovery was progressing, with broader improvements in North America, steady gains across much of Europe and early signs of recovery in Asia Pacific. It warned that some users could still see intermittent access problems or delayed email.
Why the fix took so long
In a statement quoted by MacRumors, Microsoft apologized to customers and partners. The company said that, because of the scale of demand, it brought services back gradually and checked stability at each stage, which took longer but avoided a shaky restart.
Microsoft has promised a full post-incident report once its review is finished. No date for that report has been given.
The outage came just over two weeks after Microsoft announced plans to cut thousands of jobs, MacRumors notes. The company offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 people, which MacRumors describes as a quarter of its global workforce.
