Several Microsoft services appear to be down – what we know

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Microsoft is experiencing an outage across several services, including Teams and Outlook.
• The company’s service status page appears to be down.
• It’s unclear what caused the outage.

A massive Microsoft outage appears to be underway, affecting more than just Microsoft 365 and Outlook access, as initially thought.

On Thursday morning, multiple people began reporting issues with Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, according to Downdetector. By 1 p.m., the number of reported Outlook outages was nearly 83,000, but had fallen to just under 75,000 by 2:38pm. Teams and Copilot reports have now also fallen below 3,000.

Microsoft said it was looking into the issue in an X post at 10:40 a.m. ET. At 12 p.m., 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.

As of 2:21 p.m., Microsoft’s status page still did not appear to be loading, but ZDNET was finally able to access it at 3:05pm.

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 is global, she added.

Microsoft said it has paused all deployments for now and is “restarting affected servers,” adding another update at 2:31pm.

“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. We’re working to safely return them to service,” the post said. “More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.”

This is a developing story, and ZDNET will update it with more information as we have it.