New Delhi, November 13 (TNA) Microsoft’s email and Office software services remained disrupted for a second day on Friday, with users continuing to face issues accessing Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot. The outage, which began on Thursday, has affected businesses and governments worldwide.
Microsoft said repairs were underway to fix the widespread outages, but recovery had not been sustained in all regions. The company attributed the disruption to elevated load on its infrastructure, caused by a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.
Services Affected
The outage impacted a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with Exchange Online and email services. Users reported being unable to send or receive emails, access their inboxes or load certain Microsoft applications.
Services including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint Online and Copilot were affected. The disruption also impacted OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI services through their Microsoft 365 connectors.
Scale of the Outage
More than 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday, although new reports have since fallen from that peak. The outage stretched beyond 12 hours, disrupting communications for businesses and governments worldwide. It is the second disruption to hit Microsoft’s 365 services this year.
Microsoft’s Response
Microsoft said it was using a “measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” The company said it was seeing signs of stabilisation after implementing fixes more broadly to attain a persistent recovery of services. The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the outage.
Impact on Users
The disruption has left millions of users without access to essential workplace tools, affecting email, meetings and AI-powered services. Businesses and governments have been particularly hit, with many unable to carry out routine operations. Microsoft has not yet announced a timeline for full restoration of services.