The outage that has affected Microsoft 365 since Thursday, November 12, continues to disrupt users in several regions around the world. Outlook continues to be particularly affected, while Teams, Copilot and various professional tools suffer from malfunctions. Microsoft has carried out several repair operations and is seeing signs of improvement, but a return to normal is not yet guaranteed.
Exchange Online at the center of disruption
The problem originates in Exchange Online, the infrastructure that primarily manages email and calendars. Therefore, the difficulties do not only affect Outlook: even users who check their mail from Apple Mail or other software may be affected, since these applications depend on Microsoft servers.
The magnitude of the incident is considerable. Downdetector found around 130,000 reports about Outlook on Thursday, from dozens of countries. Companies and several administrations were also affected, especially in Japan, Singapore and the Philippines. Indian airlines’ support services encountered difficulties, with no impact on their flight operations announced.
Teams and Copilot also affected
The repercussions go far beyond the messages. Copilot may not initiate certain conversations or retrieve business data necessary for your responses, including emails and appointments. Planner and To Do are also buggy. SharePoint, however, remains accessible to consult files stored directly on the platform, even if some associated functions are disrupted.
Teams retains most of its online meeting and chat capabilities. On the other hand, calendar management, meeting scheduling, and certain invitations can fail.
Microsoft releases a patch without announcing a return to normality
In its latest technical statement available Friday morning, Microsoft indicates that the solution applied to certain authentication and routing components improves the stability of the servers. Its deployment is progressively expanding, mainly in regions that are approaching their peak hours. The Redmond firm specifies that it has no indications of malicious activity that caused the incident.
However, the restoration of services remains gradual. With more than 430 million users of Microsoft 365 applications, this outage is a reminder of the extent to which professional activities now depend on a few core cloud infrastructures…
