Overview
- On Thursday, Nov. 12, Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and Copilot suffered a global outage that left tens to hundreds of thousands of users unable to access email or collaboration tools.
- Microsoft told users the problem was not a traffic spike but the unexpected decommissioning of multiple servers, which created high load on remaining infrastructure.
- As a mitigation, Microsoft paused deployments, offloaded burdened infrastructure and restarted impacted servers while posting status updates on X and working to bring services back online.
- The outage broke connector access for third‑party AI assistants such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and disrupted public services including hospital email and voicemail systems that forced patients to use online portals.
- Independent trackers logged peaks of roughly 90,000–130,000 reports and tens of thousands of lingering incidents, so companies and users should expect continued updates and possible service ripple effects as Microsoft completes restorations.