Overview
- Microsoft began receiving mass reports on Thursday, November 12, when users worldwide lost access to Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
- The company says the problem stems from elevated load after the unexpected decommissioning of multiple servers and that initial fixes—pausing deployments, offloading traffic and restarting servers—produced only partial, non‑durable recovery.
- Real‑time trackers recorded hundreds of thousands of user reports and service interruptions across 74 countries, with Downdetector peaking at roughly 130,000 reports in the United States.
- AI assistants that use Microsoft connectors, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, lost access to mail and calendar data, and critical organizations such as hospital networks, embassies and government offices reported degraded communications.
- Microsoft says there is no evidence of malicious activity so far, but this outage follows other Microsoft 365 and Azure incidents this year and may prompt large customers to reassess single‑vendor cloud dependence.