Overview
- Users began reporting access problems on Nov. 12, and Downdetector recorded a peak of 72,392 outage reports for Outlook late that day.
- Microsoft opened incident EX1550543 after initial reports and said parts of its infrastructure faced elevated load before identifying some servers as unexpectedly unavailable.
- The company suspended software deployments, redirected traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restarted impacted servers but reported only limited recovery into Nov. 13.
- Multiple Microsoft services were affected, including Exchange Online/Outlook, Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, Microsoft Store, Microsoft Account and Azure, disrupting business and government email and collaboration such as New Zealand’s foreign ministry.
- Microsoft says it has found no evidence of a cyberattack and will continue investigating root causes while restoring capacity, a situation that shows how a single cloud provider outage can quickly block communications for many organizations.