Microsoft says it’s working to fix Outlook, Copilot outage

MICROSOFT said it was working to restore access to its bundle of workplace software, saying customers may experience issues connecting to e-mail and other tools.  

Users of Exchange Online – the system that backs the Outlook email service – as well as the company’s Teams video-conferencing app and Copilot AI chatbot could have issues reaching those services, Microsoft said in updates posted to its status page on Thursday. A separate post on X, the social media site, said users “in any region” could be effected. 

Microsoft shares were mostly unchanged on Thursday. 

In a series of updates, the company detailed efforts to fix its malfunctioning systems. After initially struggling to identify the issue and test potential remedies, the company said at about 4 pm New York time (5 am in Singapore) that it had identified a solution that allowed a subset of the affected systems to return to service, and was developing an automated process to roll that out more broadly and restart unresponsive servers. 

“We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.  

Downdetector was tracking more than 100,000 reports of user issues with Microsoft services shortly after 1 pm New York time, though the number of reports has since declined for products including Outlook and Copilot. 

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Citing the outage, Workhorse Group, a truck and bus manufacturer, said it would postpone its earnings release, originally scheduled for Thursday (Nov 12), until Monday. BLOOMBERG