Microsoft down update: After 19 hours, Outlook 365, Teams and more apps getting back to normal
Microsoft says it has completed recovery actions across parts of its affected infrastructure and is gradually restoring traffic.
Outlook Mailbox access and delayed email processing are showing improvements, but some users may still face intermittent issues.
Microsoft Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, OneNote, Copilot and several other Microsoft 365, cloud and enterprise services were affected.
Outlook Down: Microsoft has made headlines in the past 20 hours for a massive outage across Microsoft 365 consumer and business products. While the company promptly acknowledged the issue and has been sharing timely updates on the matter, the service for Outlook and other Microsoft 365 apps has now started heading towards normalcy. The company noted the services are recovering and being “gradually restored”. Downdetector, an outage monitoring platform, has over 1,300 reports (comparatively lower than the peak of over 3,800) of problems ranging from the app, login page, and message delivery.
Microsoft outage today: Latest update
Microsoft 365 Status posted on X that it has made additional progress towards recovery. “Actions [are] now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic [is] being gradually restored,” @MSFT365Status said. “We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue,” it added.
The company noted it is focused on extending these recovery actions across its remaining infrastructure and ensuring stabilisation and consistency in services. In an update at 12:00 PM UTC (05:30 PM IST), the Service Health Status page said there is “encouraging recovery progress" in Europe, Japan is "comparatively" stable and North America is improving too.
Microsoft said there is no evidence of any malicious activity associated with the outage as of now. Further, “recovery efforts to restore service health throughout the affected environment is progressing.” In the Microsoft 365 consumer services, the issue affected Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, OneNote, Microsoft 365 for the web and other Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft outage today: Outlook, 365 and more apps still not fully back to normal
It all started with Microsoft acknowledging an issue with its video conferencing app, Teams, in North America at 09:10 PM on November 12. This escalated to Exchange Online mailboxes at 11:24 PM. Since then, the company has posted multiple updates on X that it is working on a fix. However, the issue has not been fixed completely at the time of filing.
In the case of Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise), the features of Microsoft 365 services that interact with “Exchange Online and email services are impacted”. In the case of Microsoft Outlook, the company said users “may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed”.
While admins may be unable to view some admin centre pages, users of Microsoft 365 apps may be unable to view “recently used files”, Microsoft added. Apart from these, Microsoft’s Cloud and Education services are affected by the outage. The company’s flagship AI model Copilot 365 may face difficulties while loading chats or receiving responses on the web and desktop.
Plus, Copilot may be unable to gain access to email, calendar, and files. Microsoft Teams, To Do, Defender XDR, Graph, Intune, Planner, Office 365, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft’s Power Apps are among other apps that are affected by the outage. The outage also impacted Anthropic's Claude AI and OpenAI ChatGPT users who use Microsoft-linked resources while chatting with the AI models.