Microsoft is working to restore Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services after an outage that began yesterday. The failure reached from the United States to Japan and Australia and had not ended by Friday morning.
The problem started on Thursday, November 12, shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern, when users in the Americas lost access to email. Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, logged nearly 130,000 Outlook problem reports at the peak. Microsoft says more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365.
The fault stems from Exchange Online, the system behind Outlook email. Users could not open mailboxes on the web, desktop or mobile, and messages arrived late. Microsoft Teams mostly continued to work for calls and chat, but some users could not schedule meetings or edit calendars. Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, sometimes could not retrieve emails, calendars or files.
Microsoft has not named a final cause and says it found no sign of a cyberattack. In a post on X, the company said a core process on affected servers was overloading and reducing capacity. Its first repairs failed. The company wrote that its actions “have not provided the anticipated relief.”
Tony Burke, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft compared the outage to the CrowdStrike failure of July 2024. He said Microsoft believes it faces “an update that has gone awry.”
The outage hit public offices and businesses in several countries:
- Japan: The government said the outage affected its IT systems, and officials switched to telephones.
- Singapore: The Government Technology Agency said government email was down.
- Philippines: The Supreme Court said the outage disrupted some operations, including email replies.
- United States: Workhorse Group delayed its quarterly earnings call.
- Hong Kong: Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, could not receive emails from US customers. Some banks also lost part of their operations.
- India: IndiGo lost its email support channel, while Air India rerouted its customer email. Neither airline reported flight delays.
- AI companies: OpenAI and Anthropic each reported trouble connecting to Microsoft 365 tools.
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By Friday, Microsoft said repairs in Asia Pacific had improved mailbox access and moved delayed emails through the system. The company is extending the work to other regions and adding capacity, though some users may still see intermittent failures. It raised the email timeout window to 48 hours to keep delayed messages from being lost. It has not given a date for full recovery.
Many users on X joked about the outage, saying it fell on a Friday and telling the Microsoft engineers to rest.
