James Okafor
Microsoft outage: thousands report problems with Outlook, Teams and Copilot as company works on a fix
A disruption at Microsoft knocked thousands of users offline on Thursday 12 November. The trouble centred on Outlook, the company's email service, but it also reached Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools. Reports collected by Downdetector show the outage hit the Americas hardest, though users in other regions were affected too.
By around 1.30 pm Eastern time (7.30 pm in Italy), more than 120,000 people in the United States had flagged problems with Outlook. Downdetector later put the figure above 130,000. Most complaints described mailboxes that would not open, messages that could not be sent or received, and slow email delivery.
Microsoft 365 drew more than 46,000 reports. Teams, the communications platform most workplaces rely on, logged roughly 3,000 users reporting access trouble. There were also reports of disruption to Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.
Microsoft points to infrastructure overload
The company says it is still working out what went wrong. In a series of updates on X, Microsoft first said users in the Americas could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes through various connection methods.
A later message named a likely culprit: part of its infrastructure was carrying a heavier load than usual, which probably caused the connection errors.
To contain the damage, Microsoft said it would spread traffic across its infrastructure to rebalance the load and bring connectivity back.
Teams affected as well, with North America restored first
Reports of Teams malfunctions had come in earlier in the day. Microsoft said it had fixed the problems in North America, though some users were still reporting connection difficulties.
The company did not immediately give further details on the cause or an overall estimate of how many users were involved. Downdetector figures come from user reports and do not necessarily reflect the real number of people affected.
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Source: euronews.com
