Microsoft is in the middle of one of its biggest outages in years. Since around 4pm Irish time on Thursday, 12 November, work and school users around the world have been unable to get into Outlook, with Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services also hit. At the time of writing on Friday morning, it still isn’t fixed, and Microsoft hasn’t given a time for when it will be.
If you’ve just logged on to work and nothing’s working, don’t worry. It’s not you, it’s not your laptop and it’s not your Wi-Fi. Here’s what’s going on with the Microsoft outage, why it’s taking so long to sort, and what you should do in the meantime.
What’s affected by the Microsoft outage
The heart of the problem is Exchange Online, the service that runs email, calendars and contacts for businesses, schools and organisations on Microsoft 365. When it goes down, Outlook goes with it, whether you’re on the desktop app, the web or your phone. Incoming email may also be delayed.
Because so much of Microsoft 365 leans on Exchange, the knock-on effects have spread. Teams calendars and meeting scheduling, parts of SharePoint, Copilot, Planner, To Do and the Defender security portal have all been affected. Intune, the tool many companies use to manage work phones and laptops, is on the list too, so if your work phone is acting up this morning, this is probably why.
It’s not just offices either. Government departments in Japan, Singapore and Australia have reported problems, and the Microsoft 365 connectors in AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude have stopped working properly.
The good news is that Microsoft says most Teams calls and chats are still working, and files stored in SharePoint can still be reached directly.
Is Outlook down for everyone?
Mostly it’s work and school accounts. The incident centres on Exchange Online, which powers Microsoft 365 mailboxes for organisations, and Microsoft hasn’t flagged personal Outlook.com or Hotmail accounts as part of it. If your personal email is misbehaving too, the Microsoft 365 service status page is the place to check.
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft says a large number of its servers unexpectedly became unavailable, which pushed all the traffic onto the servers that were left. Those couldn’t cope. Digging further, it found that a process on the affected servers, the one responsible for setting up secure connections, was getting overwhelmed and causing the servers to stop responding altogether.
What Microsoft hasn’t said yet is why those servers dropped out in the first place. My money is on a recent change gone wrong. Microsoft has been rebuilding some servers with an earlier configuration and looking at rolling back a handful of recent configuration updates, which is exactly what you do when you suspect something you pushed out recently is the culprit. Being totally transparent, that’s an educated guess, and Microsoft’s own post-incident review will tell the full story.
Why is Microsoft taking so long to fix it?
Because every time Microsoft brings servers back, they fall over again. The recovery is like when Lidl opens a new till. Everyone piles over, and that till gets clogged too. Servers come back online, millions of Outlook apps that have been trying to reconnect all night pounce on them at once, and they buckle under the load.
It gets worse as the world wakes up. Each new morning brings another wave of people logging on, and at 8am in Ireland, offices across the country opened Outlook at the same time. That’s more pressure on servers that were already wobbly.
Microsoft’s approach now is to let traffic back in gradually. It has rolled out a patch that it says has stabilised servers where it’s been applied, and it’s expanding that region by region. That’s progress, but it’s not a fix date. Mind you, half the country is probably praying this happens again next Thursday, 19 November, when GTA 6 comes out.
Was the Microsoft outage a cyberattack?
Microsoft says there’s no sign of a cyberattack or security breach. This looks like a failure inside Microsoft’s own systems.
The comparison everyone is making is with the CrowdStrike outage in July 2024, when a faulty update crashed millions of Windows PCs. This one is different. CrowdStrike broke people’s own computers, and IT teams spent days fixing them one by one. This time your laptop is fine, and it’s the servers on Microsoft’s end that are struggling. There’s nothing for your IT department to fix locally, which also means there’s nothing to do but wait.
What to do while Outlook is down
Don’t reinstall Outlook, clear your cache, restart your router or reset your password. None of it will help, because the problem isn’t on your end.
If you need to reach a colleague, Teams chat is your best bet, since Microsoft says most chats and calls are still going through. If you sent anything important since Thursday afternoon, follow it up with a call or a message, as you can’t be sure it arrived.
Most importantly, be on high alert for scams. Outages are a gift to scammers, and you can expect a wave of fake emails telling you to “verify” or “recover your Microsoft account”. Don’t click them. Your account is fine. Some of Microsoft’s own email security tools, including the feature that checks links in emails, have been caught up in the disruption too, so be extra careful with anything that lands in your inbox over the next few days.
You can keep an eye on progress on the Microsoft 365 service status page or through the Microsoft 365 Status account on X. And remember, it’s not you.
