WORLDTECHMicrosoft 365 Outage Drags Into Second Day, Root Cause Still Unconfirmed
A Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday, November 12, is now into its second day, with Outlook, Teams and Copilot users still reporting problems. Microsoft has not yet said what caused it.
How the disruption spread
The trouble began in Exchange Online, the email back end that underpins Outlook. Within roughly an hour, Downdetector was recording reports from 74 countries and territories, with the number of Outlook complaints peaking at around 130,000.
Microsoft's service health page continues to list a service degradation. Its latest update says engineers are working through what it calls residual impact while they verify that service recovery holds.
What Microsoft has said about the cause
Microsoft has attributed the problem to a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable. Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said on X that there is no indication of malicious or cyber activity.
Australia's home affairs minister, Tony Burke, went further, saying Microsoft had likened the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, in which a faulty update caused widespread failures. Microsoft has not confirmed that comparison publicly, and no official root cause has been published.
Open questions
- What specifically caused the servers to become unavailable?
- When will Microsoft confirm that service has fully recovered?