Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot as Users in 74 Countries Report Problems

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A major global outage affecting Microsoft services has disrupted businesses, government agencies and millions of users, leaving many unable to access emails, calendars, files and artificial intelligence tools. The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, affected Microsoft 365 applications, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, with customers across several countries reporting connectivity problems and interruptions to their daily activities.

The scale of the incident became increasingly clear as reports flooded outage-monitoring platform Downdetector. Reports of problems with Outlook peaked at approximately 140,000 globally, with users in 74 countries and territories reporting difficulties. Many customers were unable to send or receive emails or access their inboxes, while others experienced problems viewing files and calendar information. Although some users could still access parts of Teams, the disruption affected different services and customers to varying degrees.

The outage also extended beyond Microsoft’s own products, affecting technology companies that rely on its infrastructure. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said it was investigating problems with its connections to Microsoft services, warning that some tools were not working as expected. Anthropic also reported issues with its Microsoft 365 connector, affecting access to email, calendar and search functions. Government agencies in countries including Australia, Japan and Singapore reported disruptions, while several UK general practices warned patients that their usual online communication channels could be affected.

Microsoft ruled out a cybersecurity incident, explaining that the disruption was linked to an unusually high load on its infrastructure after a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable. The loss of capacity shifted additional traffic onto the remaining servers, placing further pressure on systems. The company said it had paused deployments, redistributed connections across its wider infrastructure and restarted affected servers in an effort to restore services. However, some of its initial recovery measures did not work as expected, as certain servers became unresponsive again when traffic returned.

By Friday morning, November 13, Microsoft said it was seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity had not returned to normal levels. The prolonged disruption has renewed concerns about the world’s dependence on a small number of major technology providers. Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt warned that the incident demonstrated how essential email remains to modern communication, business operations and access to online services. Other technology analysts said organisations could effectively lose an entire working day when critical communication and productivity platforms become unavailable.