Microsoft services face disruptions affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot
Thousands of users reported issues accessing email and other Microsoft 365 applications on Thursday.
Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, OneDrive and the Microsoft Store faced disruptions on Thursday, Nov. 12, according to reports from The Economic Times, BusinessLine and Times Now. Users reported being unable to open inboxes, frozen screens, and errors such as 'Failed to fetch' or being unable to send and receive emails.
The outage tracker Downdetector recorded over 1,29,000 error reports for Outlook just after 1 pm ET, with the US and UK being the worst hit. By 4:50 pm ET, approximately 49,000 users were still reporting Outlook problems and 18,000 were reporting issues with Microsoft 365.
Microsoft stated that a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which likely contributed to connectivity errors. The company noted that some servers were unexpectedly unavailable after failing during automated health checks. Microsoft confirmed the issues involved connecting to Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas and warned that Microsoft 365 could be impacted globally.
The company said it had successfully restored some problems related to Microsoft Teams in North America, though some connectivity issues remained. Microsoft also validated an alternative service health check method to bring a subset of affected servers back online. As a precaution, the company paused all deployments and configuration changes while reviewing recent changes for any link to the outage.
Microsoft stated that its efforts had not yet provided the anticipated relief and that it was actively restarting and validating affected servers. The company is working to reduce the impact and will provide further information via the Microsoft 365 admin centre.