Microsoft says services fully recovered after global outage disrupts Outlook, Teams

Microsoft said on Saturday (India time) its services affected by a widespread global outage, including Outlook, Teams and its Microsoft 365 suite, have fully recovered, bringing an end to a disruption that crippled workplace communications for users and businesses across several countries for over a day.

The company had faced mounting pressure to restore its services after the outage, which began on Thursday, November 12, and continued into Friday, disrupting access to email, virtual meetings, cloud-based applications and other workplace tools. Microsoft had earlier said it was seeing gradual improvements across affected regions, but warned that some users could continue to experience intermittent access issues and delays in email delivery.

Also Read: Microsoft rules out cyberattack as global outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot


The disruption centred on Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email infrastructure, and spilled over into several services that depend on it. Apart from Outlook, users reported problems accessing Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Defender XDR, among other services. Some users also faced difficulties accessing calendars, scheduling meetings and retrieving work-related information through Copilot.

Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions. Its investigation subsequently found that a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure. The company clarified that the problem was not caused by a surge in user traffic.

The recovery process proved more complicated than initially expected. Microsoft said some servers that had been brought back online became unresponsive again when traffic was redirected to them, forcing its engineering teams to explore alternative ways to restore capacity. It also made changes to traffic management and gradually brought affected infrastructure back into service, monitoring stability as more users reconnected.

The company had also linked the incident to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying issue and was working towards restoring services across the remaining affected regions.

Also Read: The Microsoft trap: One outage can bring the business world tumbling down

The outage had a wide geographical footprint, with users reporting disruptions in multiple countries and territories. The problems affected businesses, government agencies and individual users, highlighting the extent to which organisations rely on Microsoft's cloud-based productivity ecosystem for routine operations.

In India, users began reporting problems accessing Microsoft services late on Thursday, with complaints rising again on Friday morning. Among affected companies, airline IndiGo had said its email support channel was affected and that it might not be able to receive customer emails, while other support channels remained available.

Microsoft executives had also sought to rule out concerns about a possible cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was no indication that the disruption was the result of malicious or cyber activity.

The company apologised to customers and partners for the disruption, acknowledging the reliance businesses place on its services. It said it would provide a detailed post-incident report after completing its review of the outage.

Microsoft 365 is among the world's most widely used workplace productivity platforms, with more than 430 million people using its applications. The outage demonstrated how disruptions to a shared cloud infrastructure can quickly translate into operational difficulties for organisations across sectors and geographies.