Microsoft works to restore services after outage disrupts Outlook, Teams, Copilot

A widespread outage has disrupted several Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications, leaving thousands of users unable to access their email accounts and other work-related services.

Outage detection platform Downdetector showed that Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Microsoft Store, and Copilot were the top applications users were facing issues with.

Microsoft 365 Status, the company’s official account on X for service incident updates, said it was seeing positive results from efforts to restart affected infrastructure and restore server availability.

“We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner,” the account said.

What happened and who are affected

According to Microsoft's service health update, users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services due to an ongoing service degradation affecting both business and enterprise customers as well as consumer products.

The disruption is primarily affecting services that interact with Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email platform.

“We’re applying infrastructure capacity improvements where possible in an effort to help support traffic in regions coming online,” Microsoft said in its service update.

“We’re continuing to monitor the results of changes applied so we can identify strategic actions that can help to improve service health across all affected regions,” it added.

Users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web, desktop applications and mobile connections, and email delivery could also be delayed.

Microsoft said several other services were experiencing disruptions, including Copilot Chat, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft To Do, Planner, Power BI, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview.

Users of Microsoft 365 Copilot may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses through web and desktop applications.

The AI assistant may also be unable to access workplace data such as emails, calendars and files.

In Teams, features dependent on Exchange Online, including calendar access, meeting scheduling and chat creation for organisations using Information Barriers, may fail. However, core messaging and online meetings remain largely functional, Microsoft said.

Microsoft said features that do not depend on Exchange Online were continuing to function. For example, access to files stored directly in SharePoint Online remains operational.

The company said it was applying infrastructure capacity improvements to support traffic in regions coming back online.

The company said the issue could affect users attempting to access the impacted Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft's next update on the outage is scheduled for 3 am UTC on Friday, November 13 (8.30 am IST). The service health update was last revised at 2.14 am UTC (7.44 am IST).