Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for thousands

Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams remained disrupted for more than five hours on Thursday, Nov 12, with Outlook problem reports peaking at 138,058 around 1 pm ET before falling to about 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector. Microsoft said a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable for the elevated load rather than a traffic increase, and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes while restoring capacity; by 5:47 pm ET Microsoft 365 reports had dropped to nearly 13,000 and Teams reports to 763. The outage also hit Microsoft connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic AI services, and electric truckmaker Workhorse Group rescheduled its third-quarter results to Nov 16 citing business disruptions.

Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for thousands Users ‘in any region’ could be effected, says the firm in a post on X. MICROSOFT 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday Nov 12 , with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services. As of 6 pm ET 7 am in Singapore on Friday , Microsoft said it was still working to return affected servers to service, and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 pm ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector. The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable for the elevated load and not an increase in traffic. “We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. By 5.47 pm ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 user, while there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector. The tech giant had then said the restored servers had remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online. “As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a statement. Businesses feel the impact OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. In October, Microsoft reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant’s suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide. Electric truckmaker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on Thursday, rescheduled it to Nov 16 citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage. REUTERS Decoding Asia newsletter: your guide to navigating Asia in a new global order. Sign up here to get Decoding Asia newsletter. Delivered to your inbox. Free. Share with us your feedback on BT's products and services