Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 8:07 p.m. ET / 5:07 p.m. PT — Microsoft has revised its list of features and services impacted by this outage, stating that it is affecting ones that interact with Exchange Online and email services. Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint Online, Teams, Copilot AI, and 365 are all continuing to have various issues, though Azure appears to be operational.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 7:53 p.m. ET / 4:53 p.m. PT — Microsoft has issued a new update stating that the servers they've brought back online may become unresponsive again when they receive traffic. The company is currently investigating the issue, though in the meantime it's limiting the types of traffic going to these servers in some locations.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 6:23 p.m. ET / 3:23 p.m. PT — Microsoft states that it is bringing some servers back online, and "they remain stable so far." Users should expect a "gradual recovery."
"We're also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery," Microsoft wrote in an update on X. "In parallel, we've streamlined the process of returning the remaining affected servers to service."
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 5:26 p.m. ET / 2:26 p.m. PT — Microsoft services remained down on Thursday evening, as Microsoft acknowledged ongoing problems in an update posted to X.
The Microsoft global outage has affected Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services, starting around 12:30 p.m. ET.
If Outlook wouldn't load for you on Thursday, Microsoft now has a theory about what went wrong. The company said in an X post on Nov. 12 that a component responsible for checking whether its servers are working properly may be behind the failures that took some of them out of service.
In its service health update, Microsoft said some servers went offline after failing automated health checks. With parts of its infrastructure under heavier load than usual across multiple regions, the company said that extra strain was likely contributing to connection problems.
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Microsoft also says it’s "deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers" to see if that brings them back online. It has also taken steps to keep more servers from going out of service. So far, Microsoft says it hasn’t found a recent change that coincided with the start of the outage. The company is still investigating why the checks failed.
Microsoft initially flagged trouble accessing Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas. Exchange Online is the service that stores and delivers email for many Outlook users.
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The company later warned that the issue "may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region." Around 1 p.m. ET, nearly 130,000 Outlook problem reports appeared on Downdetector, and users reported trouble loading their inboxes and sending or receiving emails. Copilot users also reported problems.
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Earlier Thursday, Microsoft had also flagged problems with Teams in North America under incident TM1550488. In a follow-up on X, the company said its automated recovery systems had kicked in and were reducing the disruption.
Microsoft is posting updates under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center. If the admin center is also out of reach, Microsoft is directing users to its public service status page.
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