A widespread Microsoft outage that began on Thursday, November 12, continued into Friday, November 13, disrupting several services across the US, India, Australia, Japan and other countries. The impact included customers being unable to access Microsoft’s email, workplace applications, cloud services and AI applications.
Microsoft acknowledged the incident and said an unexpected loss of server availability had put additional pressure on its remaining infrastructure. The outages were not limited to Outlook or Microsoft Teams but also impacted security applications, enterprise management applications and third-party applications reliant on Microsoft’s cloud services, according to the company’s service health advisories. During the outage, Downdetector saw over 130,000 reports of issues with Outlook.
According to Microsoft’s service health updates, several products experienced disruptions across different categories.
The outage also impacted organisations that depend on Microsoft’s infrastructure.
reported problems with new Microsoft connector connections and certain tools. Anthropic found another upstream provider problem with its Microsoft 365 connector.
The school administration platform, School Bytes, used by schools in New South Wales, was disrupted in Australia. Government departments, including Australia’s federal police and intelligence agencies, also reported email issues.
The US House of Representatives confirmed it was impacted; it stated engineers were working with Microsoft. Meanwhile, electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter financial results announcement from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruption caused by the outage.
Microsoft said it was caused by a significant number of servers suddenly going down. Additionally, some servers were restored and then started receiving traffic, causing some to become unresponsive and adding strain to the other infrastructure, the company said.
Microsoft engineers started looking at diagnostic data and traffic management and rebuilt compromised servers with earlier software configuration. Microsoft was not convinced it was a cyber attack, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said. However, the precise technical cause had not been established.
Microsoft has begun the recovery of services, but progress has been uneven as of Friday, November 13. As traffic returned to some of those revived servers, they were beginning to slow down once more, the company said.
Microsoft was trying to restore infrastructure capacity and progressively reconnect impacted users. It warned services may take time to return to normal as applications re-established their connections.
