Microsoft Faces Major Global Outage Affecting Services

Microsoft experienced a major outage that began on November 12 and continued into November 13, disrupting its cloud-based services such as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. This incident left companies and government agencies unable to access essential systems, leading to operational challenges worldwide.

At its peak, Downdetector recorded around 130,000 reports of Outlook issues in the United States, with additional reports from Europe and Asia. Microsoft indicated that it was making progress in restoring services, although some initial repairs were unsuccessful.

The company classified the incident as an ongoing degradation as of 9:57 a.m. GMT on November 13.

Microsoft found no evidence of malicious activity causing the outage. The disruption stemmed from connectivity problems affecting Exchange Online, with some servers failing health checks.

Engineers attempted various solutions, including redistributing connections and restarting servers, but faced complications as some servers became unresponsive again. Recovery efforts involved testing configuration changes, although a definitive root cause had not been established.