A widespread Microsoft outage stretched into its second day on Friday, disrupting email, chat, and cloud services for millions of users, businesses, government agencies, and hospitals across the globe.
Connectivity problems began shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, when the outage tracking website Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports for Outlook, according to USA Today. The disruption impacted Microsoft 365 services—including Teams, SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the Copilot AI tool—as engineers scrambled to address what became one of the company’s largest-ever server issues, according to reporting by CNBC.
Microsoft appears to be making some progress with its huge Exchange / Outlook outage. Mailbox access is gradually coming back online for some customers. Sources tell me the outage has been linked to Azure VNet config changes pic.twitter.com/wNPtH2JTdw
— Post by @tomwarren on X
Technical Failure Disrupts Institutions Across Canada and the United States
The technical failure rippled across multiple continents, affecting public and private institutions alike. In Canada, hospitals, universities, government departments, and transportation services reported disruptions, according to CBC.
Unity Health Toronto declared a “code grey” infrastructure failure, while the CHUM hospital in Montreal reported impacts on appointment requests and internal activities. Via Rail advised passengers that some trip notification emails were delayed, and post-secondary institutions including the University of Toronto experienced email problems.
We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner. We’re actively monitoring the performance of these portions of infrastructure to verify stability, which we suspect will support improved…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
In the United States, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office stated its email was down due to the nationwide incident, and the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office in Colorado reported that “Because of the outage, jail officials are not receiving the email notifications needed to process online bond payments” said the sheriff's office in a statement on social media.
Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter earnings release from November 12 to November 16 due to business disruptions, as noted by USA Today.
We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. More info under…
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Internationally, services experienced widespread strain. In Australia, federal and state agencies, schools, courts, and councils reported being uncontactable by phone or email. Indian carriers Air India, IndiGo, and Akasa Air altered email handling or rerouted messages, while Japanese shipping company Sagawa Express and pharmaceutical maker Taisho faced administrative bottlenecks.
In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service reported that some services were affected, with patient calls subject to long wait times, while Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont delayed earnings announcements, according to CNBC.
The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic; we're analyzing diagnostic data to determine what's triggering the behavior. In parallel, we're temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in some…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
Microsoft Reports Recovery Progress While Managing Email Delivery Delays
Microsoft reported progress as the incident entered its second day. According to The Verge, the company observed continued recovery progress across North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in the Asia-Pacific region, though some users continued to experience intermittent access issues and delayed email delivery.
To preserve messages during the backlog, Microsoft extended the email timeout window to 48 hours so that delayed communications would continue attempting delivery, as reported by CNBC and Mashable. Company engineers traced initial problems to a traffic surge and a core component responsible for monitoring server health.
According to Mashable, Microsoft deployed targeted changes to bypass the faulty component on a subset of servers, validated an alternative service health check method, and redistributed connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure.
“We're observing partial recovery across regions in which we've applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren't resulting in sustained recovery, so we're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” Microsoft said in a service health notice.
We're returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far. We're also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery. In parallel, we've streamlined the process of returning the remaining affected servers to…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
Amid speculation fueled by recent high-profile cyber incidents, Microsoft said that it was not aware of any malicious activity or cyber-attack causing the outage. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke noted in a press conference that Microsoft believed the situation bore some similarities to an earlier software update issue experienced with CrowdStrike, according to CNBC.
As recovery efforts continued, the prolonged disruption prompted broader questions regarding modern organizational reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. Experts such as James Owen, managing partner of Digital Risks at Control Risks, pointed to a dependency issue decades in the making as enterprises grow increasingly reliant on a smaller segment of critical technology, according to CNBC.
We’re opening all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. We found a core process on affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, causing capacity loss. To validate a potential recovery, we're isolating a portion…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
Earlier coverage: Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook and Teams, Downdetector Reports
We're actively restarting and validating the affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
More on Microsoft
We've validated an alternative service health check method, which allowed a subset of affected servers to successfully return to service. We're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing automated recovery systems to continually detect and restart unresponsive…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/uFnnN6Svuf if the admin center is not available to you.
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue. To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We're engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact, address our current blocker, and returning portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We've reviewed known impact scenarios and revised the list of impacted services and features, which can be viewed in the "more info" section of the communication MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/uFnnN6Svuf if the admin center is not available…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
— Post by @MSFT365Status on X
The Microsoft outage continues hours later, with Outlook and Teams still being down for many users globally. (https://t.co/VnABRBgwhj) pic.twitter.com/kwLRqvyjIa
— Post by @PopBase on X
Following the global Microsoft outage you may find it difficult to contact me or my office today, we cannot access email and casework responses may be delayed. Phones are working but will be heavily overloaded. We will do our best but bare with us! https://t.co/irWhGvsqBo
— Post by @ChiOnwurah on X