Microsoft is facing challenges in restoring Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services after a widespread outage disrupted email access and workplace communication across multiple countries. The disruption, which began on Thursday night, November 12, has continued into Friday, with engineers working to stabilise affected servers that have repeatedly become unresponsive after being restored.
The incident has affected Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email and calendar platform, along with parts of Teams, SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Although Microsoft has reported early signs of recovery, service capacity has remained below normal, leaving users facing intermittent access problems and delayed messages.
The prolonged disruption has raised concerns for businesses that depend on Microsoft's cloud ecosystem for daily communication, collaboration and customer support.
Why Recovery Is Taking So Long
The biggest challenge for Microsoft has been keeping restored servers operational once traffic returns. The company reported that several servers had unexpectedly gone offline, forcing the remaining infrastructure to handle requests that would normally be distributed across a larger pool of machines.
Engineers managed to bring some affected servers back online, but certain systems became unresponsive again when they began handling traffic. This has complicated the recovery process, as restoring individual machines does not automatically guarantee that the overall service can handle normal demand.
Microsoft has been working to roll back a network change and adjust how traffic is distributed across its infrastructure. However, the company has not confirmed whether that change triggered the incident or published a definitive root-cause analysis.
Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said the company had found no indication of malicious or cyber activity at that stage. The investigation into the technical cause remains important as engineers work to restore stable service rather than simply bring individual servers back online.
Outlook and Connected Services Hit
Outlook has experienced the most visible disruption, with users reporting difficulties opening mailboxes through web browsers, desktop applications and mobile devices. Some users have also experienced delays in receiving messages, while previously downloaded emails may remain accessible through desktop clients.
The disruption has extended to several Microsoft services that rely on Exchange Online, including parts of Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Planner and To Do. The impact has varied across applications, depending on their reliance on the affected email infrastructure.
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports in the United States at the outage's peak. Reports also emerged from dozens of other countries and territories. These figures represent complaints submitted by users and do not establish the total number of people affected.
Microsoft has extended Outlook's email timeout window to 48 hours, allowing systems additional time to retry delivery of delayed messages.
Businesses Face Communication Disruptions
The outage has affected organisations that rely on email for customer communication and business operations. In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air warned that messages sent to their customer support teams could be delayed or fail to reach them. Air India said it had rerouted incoming emails and that flight operations remained unaffected.
Other organisations and government agencies internationally have also reported difficulties with digital communication. Problems affecting connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic products further demonstrated how an outage in a major cloud platform can disrupt services built on top of it.
Microsoft has reported early stabilisation and improvements in available capacity, but full recovery has not been confirmed.
Cloud Reliability Under Scrutiny
The incident highlights the operational challenges of restoring large cloud services when infrastructure failures and traffic pressure interact. Even when servers return online, businesses may continue to experience problems until capacity, connectivity and dependent applications stabilise.
For Microsoft, the immediate priority is to restore reliable access to Outlook and connected services while identifying the underlying cause. Until the company confirms a full recovery and publishes more details about the failure, users and businesses may need to prepare for intermittent disruption.
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