Microsoft 365 continues to experience a major global outage on Friday, November 13, affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and several other cloud services. The disruption began on Thursday and has left users unable to access emails, manage calendars, and use workplace applications. Microsoft has reported signs of recovery, although its official service health page continues to show service degradation for business and consumer products.
The outage has affected organizations across multiple countries, with Downdetector recording more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports at its peak. Users have reported failed logins, inaccessible mailboxes, and delayed emails, while businesses and government agencies have also experienced disruptions.
Microsoft 365 Outage Affects Multiple Services
According to Microsoft’s incident report MO1550821, the problems primarily involve Exchange Online, which handles email and calendar services across Microsoft 365.
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The affected services include:
- Outlook: Users cannot access some mailboxes through desktop, web, or mobile applications, while email delivery may be delayed.
- Microsoft Teams: Calendar access and meeting scheduling are affected, although core messaging and online meetings remain largely functional.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot: Users may experience failed responses or problems accessing emails, calendars, and work files.
- SharePoint and Microsoft 365: Some connected features and recently used file lists may fail to load.
- Microsoft Defender and other services: Security portals, Microsoft Graph requests, Planner, and administrative tools are experiencing disruptions.
The outage has also affected Microsoft 365 connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic, extending its impact beyond Microsoft’s own applications.
Microsoft Identifies Server Problems as Recovery Continues
Microsoft initially traced the connectivity failures to overloaded infrastructure across multiple regions. Its investigation found that a core server process was becoming overwhelmed, causing affected servers to stop responding when traffic returned.
The company has since applied a patch to an upstream authentication and routing configuration component, reporting improvements in server stability. Recovery efforts are expanding across affected regions, although some users continue to experience intermittent problems.
Microsoft has found no indication of malicious activity and has yet to publish a final root-cause report.
When Will Microsoft 365 Services Return to Normal?
Microsoft has not announced a confirmed time for full restoration. Its recovery measures have improved mailbox access and delayed email processing in some regions, but the company continues to monitor server capacity.
Users can follow incidents MO1550821 and EX1550543 through the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates.
Meanwhile, users experiencing repeated Outlook login prompts or email synchronization problems can review guidance on Outlook password issues on iPhone and Apple Mail not syncing with Outlook. However, local troubleshooting will not resolve failures caused by Microsoft’s ongoing server outage.
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