On the evening of November 12, a massive global outage occurred in Microsoft's cloud services and continued into Friday, November 13. Users in dozens of countries faced access problems with corporate email Outlook, Teams platform, artificial intelligence Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools.
The problems are evidenced by Downdetector data and official Microsoft announcements. According to Deutsche Welle, outage reports came from 74 countries and territories. In the US, nearly 130,000 complaints about Outlook were recorded at the peak.
The corporate email Exchange Online, on which Outlook and a number of other Microsoft services depend, was most affected. Users reported inability to access mailboxes, delays in email delivery, and connection errors in both browser and desktop versions of Outlook.
Issues also affected Microsoft Teams, though core platform functions such as group chats, video calls, and online meetings largely continued to work. However, failures occurred when scheduling meetings, sending invitations, working with calendars, and creating certain channels.
Users of Microsoft 365 Copilot may have lost access to the AI chat or failed to receive responses to their queries. Additionally, Copilot sometimes couldn't work with corporate data, including email, calendars, and files.
According to Microsoft, disruptions also affected certain functions of SharePoint Online, Planner, Microsoft To Do, Power BI, Microsoft Graph, Intune, and admin tools. Errors occurred, in particular, when managing tasks, loading administrative pages, exporting reports, and performing corporate data operations.
Among the impacted tools were also certain functions of Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview, which are used for information protection and corporate security management.
Microsoft explained that part of the server infrastructure suffered from excessive load and request processing issues. The company attempted to redistribute traffic, restore server operations, and increase available capacity, but the initial measures did not ensure stable service restoration.
In the latest update, posted on November 13 at 06:17 Kyiv time (with UTC adjustment - at 08:17), the company stated that it continues testing traffic optimization mechanisms, load limiting, and backup routing to stabilize systems.
Microsoft stressed that there are currently no signs of malicious activity that could have caused the incident. The corporation promised to disclose the final causes of the outage after recovery operations are completed.
As of the morning of November 13, full restoration of all affected services had not been confirmed.
Based on materials from: Microsoft, Downdetector, Deutsche Welle
