Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot Worldwide for a Second Day

MSFT suffered a widespread Microsoft 365 outage beginning on the afternoon of Thursday, November 12, knocking out or degrading Outlook, Teams and Copilot along with services such as SharePoint, OneDrive and Intune. Downdetector reports peaked at more than 130,000, users in more than 70 countries were affected, and government agencies in Japan, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines reported disruption, per Yahoo Finance. PCMag dated the first spike in reports to about 12:30 p.m. ET.

Microsoft first attributed the problem to "elevated load" and said it was "redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure". It later said a large number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, froze deployments, and moved traffic off the affected infrastructure, while acknowledging that initial repairs had not worked as expected. The company said there was no sign of a cyberattack and that it would publish a post-incident report.

The disruption carried into Friday. Petri reported recovery in Asia Pacific early on November 13 and "encouraging recovery progress in Europe," with Microsoft deploying a targeted configuration update to an authentication and routing component; full restoration had not been confirmed by Friday morning. Knock-on effects reached third-party tools that connect to Microsoft 365, and Bloomberg described it as one of the company's longest outages, per Oninvest.

Microsoft shares fell about 2% to 3% in premarket trading on Friday as the outage stretched into a second day, according to Oninvest and GuruFocus. It is the second major Microsoft 365 incident in about two months, after a September outage tied to a core authentication configuration. Investors will look to the post-incident report and to any enterprise customer reaction for a read on reliability risk to the Microsoft 365 and Copilot franchise.