Microsoft Outage Drags Into Second Day With Only Partial Recovery

The latest:

Microsoft is still fighting to restore access to its core workplace software more than a day after Outlook, Teams and Copilot began failing for users around the world. The company said on Friday it was recovering front-end servers and applying traffic optimisation measures, and that it had seen partial recovery in regions where those adjustments were made. It also said earlier fixes were not going as expected.

Details:

• The services hit: Outlook email, Teams chat, the Copilot AI assistant, OneDrive and Azure were all disrupted for large numbers of users through most of Thursday’s US workday, according to Microsoft and monitoring site Downdetector. Microsoft later confirmed the failure broadly affected its Microsoft 365 suite rather than a single product.
• The timeline: Microsoft said its Exchange Online incident began at 4.17pm US time on Thursday, 8.17pm UAE time. More than seven hours later it was still issuing updates, and the disruption carried into Friday, when it said it was reviewing what further actions could improve infrastructure stability.
• The scale: Outage reports spread to 74 countries and territories within roughly an hour on November 12, Downdetector said. Within two hours, reports across five Microsoft services hit 19,650 a minute, against fewer than 15 a minute on a typical Thursday.
• The breakdown: Outlook reports peaked at more than 2,000 times normal levels, Downdetector said. Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold and Azure about 100-fold, while Microsoft-owned Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn rose far less.
• The suspected cause: Microsoft said the elevated load was not driven by a rise in traffic but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable. After hours of troubleshooting the company said the exact cause was still not known, and it has not set a restoration deadline.
• The fixes attempted: Microsoft said it was adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing traffic and applying strategic traffic blocking, after earlier spreading connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure. It also moved to re-isolate a portion of infrastructure and restart components it suspected were behind the failure.
• What did not work: The company said it was pursuing all available pathways to restore service but that those efforts “have not provided the anticipated relief”. It also warned that servers returned to service might become unresponsive again once traffic began moving through them.
• Who was affected: Governments and companies worldwide were disrupted. Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget said a widescale Microsoft 365 outage across North America was causing email and application problems, and warned that responses to emails might be delayed.
• The classification: Microsoft classified the Outlook problem as a service degradation on its status page, saying users might be unable to connect to mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods, and that it had collected networking logs to investigate the errors.
• The exposure: Microsoft products rank among the most widely used in businesses, governments and schools, leaving organisations without email, chat and file-sharing simultaneously during the working day and with no immediate alternative platform.

Between the lines:

Microsoft’s own finding points away from a demand spike: it said load rose because servers vanished from the pool, not because users surged. That distinction matters because adding capacity does not solve it, which fits the company’s description of partial recovery that fails to hold, and its warning that restored servers may fall over again once traffic reaches them.

What’s next

Watch Microsoft’s service health page and its updates on X for confirmation of sustained rather than partial recovery, a named root cause, and any post-incident report explaining why front-end servers became unavailable.