Microsoft began restoring services on Friday, Nov. 13, after an outage around the world disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools for more than 12 hours, and said service was showing early signs of recovery but some users could still have problems.
The disruption began Thursday and affected services connected to Exchange Online, Microsoft’s email platform. Problems were reported across regions and had indirect effects on businesses and government operations. Microsoft said it had no indication that the incident was caused by malicious activity.
However, it had not yet identified a confirmed cause. Recovery was uneven. Some servers brought back online stopped responding again when traffic returned.
Engineers tried further fixes and restored capacity in stages. By Friday, Microsoft reported progress in parts of Asia-Pacific, including improved mailbox access and email processing. It was working to extend recovery measures to other regions.
Microsoft also said a configuration patch was producing positive results for server stability. However, it had not confirmed that services had fully returned to normal. Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems at the outage’s peak.
Microsoft’s services also affected outside organizations that depend on its tools. Microsoft said it would continue recovery work and publish a fuller account of the incident after the disruption was resolved.