A major Microsoft outage left tens of thousands of users without access to Outlook and other company services. Users reported that they were unable to open their inboxes or send or receive emails.
At its peak, Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook. Reuters reported more than 97,000 reports at around 14:07 Eastern Time. The platform’s data reflects submitted complaints and does not show the exact number of affected users.
Problems with Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365
The incident mainly affected Exchange Online and various ways of accessing mailboxes, including Outlook on the web and applications connected to the service. There were also reports of disruptions to Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 components.
Initially, the problems were associated with users in North America, but Microsoft subsequently said that the impact could extend to other regions. Some organizations and users also had difficulty accessing the admin center, which is normally used to monitor the status of services.
Servers unexpectedly became unavailable
Microsoft said that the increased load was not the result of an unusual rise in traffic, but rather of “a large number of servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable.” This placed additional strain on the remaining infrastructure and led to connection errors.
The company began rerouting traffic to other parts of its global infrastructure, restarting the affected servers and restoring their functionality. Microsoft also temporarily halted the rollout of changes and updates while engineers analyzed the cause of the failure.
“We are working hard across every possible avenue to mitigate the impact,” Microsoft 365 Status said.Recovery continues
According to the latest available information, services had begun to recover for some users. Microsoft warned, however, that some servers could become unresponsive again after a larger volume of traffic was routed back to them.
At around 00:50 GMT on November 13, Downdetector was still recording approximately 30,000 reports of problems with Outlook. At that point, the company had not announced the official end of the incident, and the investigation into its cause was continuing.
Sources: apnews.com, investing.com, tomsguide.com