Tech Reporter
Microsoft is battling to restore its online services following a major global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications, leaving businesses, government departments and millions of users potentially affected.
The disruption began on Thursday, 12 November, and continued into Friday, with the technology giant acknowledging that attempts to restore normal operations had not worked as expected.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in its latest updates.
“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”
The outage has affected Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, with users reporting difficulties accessing email accounts, sending messages and connecting to cloud-based applications.
According to Reuters, more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems were recorded in the United States alone at the height of the disruption on Thursday.
Outage monitoring website Downdetector also recorded complaints across multiple countries, including Australia, India and Japan, as the disruption spread across different time zones.
Deutsche Welle reported that Downdetector had received complaints from 74 countries and territories within approximately an hour.
Struggle to restore services
Microsoft initially identified unusually high demand on parts of its infrastructure but subsequently determined that the increased load was linked to servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable.
This left the remaining infrastructure struggling to handle normal traffic.
The company attempted to restore affected servers, redistribute traffic and increase capacity across its systems.
However, some servers reportedly became unresponsive again after being returned to service, complicating recovery efforts.
Microsoft said it had observed limited recovery in parts of its network but had not confirmed when all affected services would return to normal.
The company also indicated that recent configuration changes were being examined as engineers worked to identify solutions.
Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said there was no indication that the disruption had resulted from malicious activity.
“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he said.
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
The disruption has affected organisations that depend on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure for daily operations, including government agencies, schools and businesses.
The outage also affected Microsoft 365 integrations used by artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
Both companies reported problems with services that connect their platforms to Microsoft applications.
No confirmed time for full restoration
As of Friday morning, Microsoft had not announced a confirmed time for full restoration.
Its public service-health platform continued to indicate service degradation affecting Microsoft 365 business customers and consumer products.
Although the company reported some progress in restoring affected servers, users were warned that recovery could be gradual as applications reconnected.
The company said it was continuing to investigate the disruption and implement measures to restore stability across its network.
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