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Updated on Friday, Nov. 13 at 11:55 a.m. ET — Microsoft provided a statement to Mashable expressing “regret” for the outage. The company also said it didn’t believe a cyberattack caused the outage.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.” — Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft
Updated on Friday, Nov. 13 at 4:59 a.m. ET — Microsoft says it’s “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.” The company also said it has extended email timeout to 48 hours to help preserve delayed mail during this event.
Updated on Friday, Nov. 13 at 1:08 a.m. ET — Microsoft is still looking into the cause of the outage, but states that at present it is “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident.”
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 10:58 p.m. ET — Unfortunately, Microsoft’s efforts to bring servers back online aren’t going as planned. It appears to have been unable to address the issue of them becoming unresponsive again, and has stated it is now searching for different ways to increase traffic capacity.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft wrote in an update on X.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 8:07 p.m. ET — Microsoft has revised its list of features and services impacted by this outage, stating that it is affecting ones that interact with Exchange Online and email services. Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint Online, Teams, Copilot AI, and 365 are all continuing to have various issues, though Azure appears to be operational.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 7:53 p.m. ET — Microsoft has issued a new update stating that the servers they’ve brought back online may become unresponsive again when they receive traffic. The company is currently investigating the issue, though in the meantime it’s limiting the types of traffic going to these servers in some locations.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 6:23 p.m. ET — Microsoft states that it is bringing some servers back online, and “they remain stable so far.” Users should expect a “gradual recovery.”
“We’re also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery,” Microsoft wrote in an update on X. “In parallel, we’ve streamlined the process of returning the remaining affected servers to service.”
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 5:39 p.m. ET — As of this writing, the global Microsoft outage remains ongoing.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 3:55 p.m. ET — We’ve updated this story with the latest statements from Microsoft.
Microsoft had a really bad Thursday.
Starting in the early afternoon, Microsoft 365 enterprise software products experienced a major outage, which extended into Friday morning. On the platform DownDetector, more than 100,000 users reported problems with Outlook alone, starting around 12:30 p.m. ET on Thursday.
The company has posted regular updates about the situation, both on social media and on its website.
On the company’s official status page (which also went offline briefly, according to multiple Mashable reporters), Microsoft said that Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, Defender XDR, and other services were experiencing issues. At first, the status page indicated that the outage only affected Microsoft’s enterprise software, Microsoft 365; however, as of this writing, the page lists Microsoft Consumer Products as also experiencing “service degradation.”
On Friday morning, the company finally provided an official statement about the global outage.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,” said Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft. “We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”
And in an update posted to X, the company said it had no reason to believe a cyberattack was the cause of the outage.
“We will continue to share more information as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”
The Microsoft 365 outage: A timeline so far
In an initial update posted at 12:54 p.m. ET to X, the company said that customers were having problems with Exchange Online mailboxes “in the Americas.” Exchange Online is a cloud-based tool that provides back-end support for Microsoft Outlook.
However, by 1:07 p.m. ET, the company acknowledged the problem was more widespread, affecting more services and regions. “While we’re working to mitigate impact, we’ve confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region,” the company posted.
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The Microsoft Status page was then updated with a notification that stated, “User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.”
While a root cause has yet to be determined, Microsoft has at least shared a brief technical explanation for what’s going on.
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“We’ve determined that the elevated load isn’t driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure,” Microsoft said on its status page, as well as in a thread on X. “We’re investigating what’s causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.”
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Later on in the X thread, Microsoft said it had not identified any recent change that correlates with the outage, but “the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that’s responsible for processing server health.” In the meantime, Microsoft has worked to prevent more servers from being impacted while it also tries to resuscitate the ones that are down.
Shortly before 4 p.m. ET, the Microsoft status page received another update, stating that it is still troubleshooting and restarting servers.
“While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective,” Microsoft said. “We’re restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we’re applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.”
By the evening, Microsoft’s updates turned slightly more optimistic, as the company stated that some servers had already come back online. A 4:00 p.m. update stated that the company had “validated an alternative service health check method, which allowed a subset of affected servers to successfully return to service.”
However, by 5:09 p.m. on Thursday, the company acknowledged that services remained offline.
“We’re opening all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” read an update posted to its website.
As the outage continued into Friday morning, the company finally reported progress toward recovery.
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This is a developing story…
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