Microsoft is working to restore its 365 services after an outage on Thursday, November 12 left users unable to access Outlook and other apps. The company said on its Microsoft 365 Status account: “We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” pointing to incident EX1550543 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, NBC Chicago reported.
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports at the peak, covering Outlook as well as Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Copilot assistant, The Guardian reported.
Microsoft later said a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load,” which it said likely contributed to the connectivity errors, after a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable and failed automated checks. The company said its review had identified recent configuration updates as a potential cause, still under investigation, and that it had paused all deployments and configuration changes as a precaution.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no indication of a cyber attack, The Guardian reported.
Recovery has been partial. In a service-health update posted at 12:08 AM UTC (5:38 AM IST), Microsoft said servers it returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic. The company says it is limiting which types of traffic reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations, and rebuilding a subset of servers with a previous software configuration to test whether that prevents the problem, expanding the approach if it works. It has reported limited recovery in some regions, and full restoration had not been confirmed in the sources Elsepost checked at the time of writing.
In its 2:14 AM UTC (7:44 AM IST) update, Microsoft said it was applying infrastructure capacity improvements to support traffic in regions coming online and was monitoring the results. The service remained in a degraded state at the time of writing.
Microsoft’s initial statement named the Americas, but reports surfaced elsewhere too. Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported worldwide problems with the service, and an India outage tracker showed moderate complaints for Outlook, while “outlook down” briefly became one of Google’s fastest-rising searches in India around midnight IST.
Users who still cannot reach their mailbox can check Microsoft’s service health page for updates. During such outages, web and mobile access can behave differently, so if one fails, the other is worth trying.
This is a developing story. Elsepost will update it as Microsoft shares more.
Sources: Microsoft 365 service health status; NBC Chicago; The Guardian.