ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft is experiencing an outage across services, including Outlook.
- The company doesn’t suspect a cyberattack or other malicious activity.
- Service is improving, but not for everyone.
A massive Microsoft outage that started Thursday morning is still at least partially underway, affecting more than just Microsoft 365 and Outlook access, as initially thought. Even Microsoft’s status page was down until around 3 p.m. ET Thursday.
On Friday at 7 a.m. ET, Microsoft shared an update on X that it was “seeing encouraging recovery progress” and that “a growing portion” of Microsoft 365 services was improving. Several commenters on X reported that they still had no access to their services, primarily Outlook, as of early Friday morning.
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When the outage started
On Thursday morning, multiple people began reporting issues with Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, according to Downdetector. By 1 p.m. ET, the number of reported Outlook outages was nearly 83,000 but had fallen to just under 75,000 by 2:38 p.m. ET. Teams and Copilot reports have since dropped below 1,000.
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Microsoft said it was looking into the issue in an X post at 10:40 a.m. ET. At noon, Microsoft posted on X that the issue had been resolved, but commenters on the post said they were still experiencing outages as recently as 1:43 p.m. ET across Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive.
One person ZDNET spoke to at a law firm that uses Outlook said that, as of 2 p.m. ET on Nov. 12, she couldn’t send or receive mail, but the inbox search function seemed to be working. She said she was able to search and open emails, but that the last time her email appeared to be working was 12:44 p.m., about 40 minutes after Microsoft said it fixed the issue. She was told by her firm that the outage was global, she added.
After “restarting affected servers” Thursday afternoon, Microsoft added another update at 2:31 p.m. ET.
“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,” the post said.
What caused the outage?
Microsoft has yet to confirm what caused the outage, but some reports indicate it may have been a software update.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, said on X late Thursday night, “I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
According to CNN, Microsoft told Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke that they “don’t believe they are dealing with a cyber attack.” During a press conference, Burke said Microsoft told him “they believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry.”
That refers to the great CrowdStrike meltdown of July 2024, in which a software issue disrupted operations at hospitals, airlines, and other major information hubs.
Also: Microsoft fixes over 1,000 Windows flaws – and one is being exploited
This is a developing story, and ZDNET will update it with more information as we have it.
