Microsoft outage leaves Outlook, Teams and Copilot disrupted into a second day

Microsoft's workplace software, including Outlook, Teams and the Copilot assistant, was disrupted worldwide from about 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, November 12, and Microsoft's efforts to restore it had not fully worked by Friday, according to BBC News and Al Jazeera.

Outlook complaints peaked around 1 p.m. ET

Reports of problems with Outlook climbed to about 130,000 on the outage tracker Downdetector shortly after 1 p.m. ET (18:00 GMT) on Thursday, according to Al Jazeera. The BBC put the peak at nearly 140,000 reports from 74 countries around the same time. Downdetector counts user reports, not affected customers, and the two outlets rounded it differently.

Users also had trouble with Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services, and the company said the issues could affect users in any region, Al Jazeera reported. The BBC said that more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, citing Microsoft's website.

Microsoft points to servers that failed health checks

Microsoft said on social media that servers were unavailable and failing automatic health checks, putting pressure on those still operating, according to Al Jazeera. The BBC reported that Microsoft attributed the outage to "elevated load" on its infrastructure and ruled out a cyber-attack.

The company said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute traffic that was elevated on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services to bring them back online, Al Jazeera reported. Its first fixes did not work as expected, according to both outlets.

On Friday, Microsoft reported partial recovery in certain regions, but Al Jazeera said its measures had not ensured sustained recovery. Problems were also reported in Asia and Australia on Friday morning.

Australia's Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke offered a different comparison at a news conference. "They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke said, according to Al Jazeera. That is the minister's account of what Microsoft believes; Microsoft's own statements described load and unavailable servers.

Who felt it beyond office email

OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems as a result of the outage, the BBC said. The Singaporean government and Australia's spy agency also said they were affected, and several GP practices in the UK warned of potential problems, with some telling patients to phone instead of using email or web forms.

Al Jazeera said Australia's federal police were among the organisations caught up in the outage.

One software layer, many dependent businesses

We think the outage is a reminder that a company's productivity software is a form of infrastructure it rarely budgets for as one. Email, calendars and an AI assistant sat behind a single supplier's servers, and the affected organizations ranged from AI developers to doctors' surgeries. That concentration is efficient when it works and expensive when it does not.

The opportunity is for suppliers and customers that can show a tested fallback, such as a second communication channel, because resilience can become a purchasing criterion. The threat is for Microsoft: if the root-cause report shows a change rolled out unsafely rather than a load spike, as Burke's comparison suggests, customers may ask for contractual commitments, not apologies. We would watch whether Microsoft publishes that report and what it says about how its spare capacity is managed. Our view would change if the report shows an external trigger beyond the company's control.

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