Microsoft Gradually Restores Outlook, Teams and Copilot After Global Overload

Overview

• The outage began on Thursday, November 12, with users reporting access failures to Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services and Downdetector showing large spikes in complaints across more than 70 countries.
• Microsoft says investigation found a subset of servers experiencing unusually high process load that produced connectivity errors and it has ruled out evidence of a hacker attack.
• To mitigate the problem Microsoft suspended updates, redirected traffic away from affected infrastructure, restarted problematic servers and widened those fixes until services began to recover region by region.
• By the morning of Friday, November 13, the company reported gradual restoration with clearer improvements in Europe and North America but warned some users would still face intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery as backlogs clear.
• The outage disrupted hospitals, embassies, airlines, exchanges and corporate operations worldwide and highlights the risks companies and governments face when core communications run through a single cloud provider; Microsoft says it will publish a detailed post-incident report explaining the root cause and steps to prevent recurrence.