Washington, November 13: Thousands of corporate employees, businesses, government agencies and organizations worldwide have been unable to access their Outlook emails, Microsoft Team chats and Copilot tools due to an unexpected outage that has lasted 10 hours starting at about 11.00 PM IST. The widespread disruption, reported aross the world, has left Microsoft struggling to address the outage, looking for infrastructure fixes as initial recovery efforts haven’t borne fruit.
This disruption has severely impacted Microsoft Exchange Online, the cloud backbone responsible for storing and managing emails for millions of commercial and enterprise accounts. Users attempting to load their inboxes experienced connection timeouts, HTTP server errors, and a complete inability to send or receive messages.
Beyond this, the service glitch has affected other core Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft Copilot. Independent outage monitoring platforms have recorded thousands of user problem reports, with Microsoft engineering teams isolating the technical trigger that became overwhelmed, causing servers to abruptly stop processing user traffic.
“We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure. We’re working to safely return them to service,” the company said in a post on X.
With the disruption going on for many hours, many US office workers celebrated the development, hoping to start the weekend early, while others faced challenges with their interviews as virtual meetings were not possible.
Microsoft is hoping to address the challenge soon.
“We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner. We’re actively monitoring the performance of these portions of infrastructure to verify stability, which we suspect will support improved availability as these actions are subsequently expanded more broadly,” it said in a latest update.
