Updated on Friday, Nov 13 at 09:35am ET: Microsoft continues to work on the global outage that brought down Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services on Thursday (and into Friday morning).
The company’s latest update says that they’re “continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.” However, the problem is still not entirely fixed, as Microsoft says “some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues.”
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Updated on Friday, Nov 13 at 07:35am ET: Microsoft’s latest update confirms they’ve made “additional progress toward recovery” and that traffic is “being gradually restored” — although “some users may still experience intermittent issues.”
Yep, the Microsoft Outage is still ongoing as of Friday morning — but there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
The global issues affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot, Microsoft 365, and other major services began on Thursday and brought many people’s workdays to a swift halt.
At 4:24 a.m. ET, a Microsoft post on X indicated that the company was finally seeing signs of “early stabilization” and taking steps to preserve people’s email. The company extended email timeout to 48 hours to ensure that messages that failed to deliver on Thursday aren’t totally lost.
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At the start of the workday, major services including Outlook remained unavailable for many users. At 9:17 a.m. ET, the company reported that it was “continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.”
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By 10:00 a.m., user error reports on the platform DownDetector had plateaued, though they were still elevated from baseline levels. As of this writing, Microsoft’s Service Health Status page still lists both Microsoft 365 (business and enterprise) and Microsoft Consumer Products as experiencing “service degradation.”
Microsoft is still investigating the cause of the outage, but Microsoft has previously said it is “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident.”
How the Microsoft outage began
The outage began in the early afternoon on Thursday, impacting Microsoft 365 Enterprise products and causing a massive spike in reported user issues for services like Outlook, per Downdetector.
Microsoft shared updates on X and on its status page, providing hourly reports suggesting they were working towards a resolution. Clearly, though, the fix has been more complicated than they’d hoped. As the issues continued into the night, the company confirmed on X that changes it had made to try and “improve serviceability” were not “taking as expected”.
The internet reacted by touching grass, and – given that the outage is ongoing as of Friday morning – the UK is currently doing the same.
This is a developing story…
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