Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for businesses and governments

MICROSOFT services such as Outlook and Teams were disrupted for about 10 hours on Thursday (Nov 12) as the tech giant struggled to fix issues with some servers, hitting businesses and government agencies globally that use the popular platforms.

In its latest update, Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing as expected.

“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” it said.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 25,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 930 pm ET (10.30 am in Singapore on Friday). It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, early on Friday local time.

At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1 pm ET on Thursday.

In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and e-mail were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. Exchange Online is the company’s cloud-based messaging platform that delivers e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

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Impact on e-mail systems

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack.

“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said at a press conference.

“The impact that they are dealing with ... is very much on e-mail systems,” the minister added.

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Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among organisations caught up in the outage on Friday.

The CrowdStrike malfunction of 2024 was one of the largest internet disruptions, hobbling technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.

The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft.

The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable and said it was not driven by an increase in traffic.

Microsoft had then said the restored servers remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.

“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a previous statement.

At 6 pm ET (7 am in Singapore on Friday), Microsoft had said it observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected.

Businesses feel the impact

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.

Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

In October, Microsoft reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant’s suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Electric truckmaker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on Nov 12, rescheduled it to Nov 16 citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage. REUTERS