Microsoft struggles to restore Outlook, Teams, Copilot after global outage
Microsoft is struggling to restore its Outlook email service and other workplace applications following a global outage that disrupted access to its services across 74 countries and territories.
The disruption, which began on November 12, has affected businesses, government institutions and schools, leaving users unable to access emails and other Microsoft 365 services.
In an update on X on Friday, the technology company said efforts to stabilise its infrastructure had resulted in partial recovery in some regions but had yet to produce sustained improvements.
“We’re continuing our efforts to improve service stability and traffic flow. This includes adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing traffic, and applying strategic traffic blocking measures,” the company said.
Microsoft said it was reviewing additional measures after its interventions failed to achieve a sustained recovery.
“We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery, so we’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” it added.
The company said it was deploying multiple strategies to minimise the impact of the disruption, address the technical challenges and restore affected parts of its service infrastructure.
It also said it was working to recover its frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimisation measures to improve stability and increase capacity.
Other affected Microsoft products include Teams, Copilot and SharePoint.
According to CNN, Downdetector, an outage-monitoring platform, recorded disruption reports across 74 countries and territories within about an hour, while complaints involving Outlook peaked at more than 130,000 on Thursday.
The outage has also disrupted business and government operations in several countries.
In Japan, government employees reportedly resorted to making physical copies of documents following disruptions to government services, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court warned of delays in email responses and other transactions.
Some businesses and schools in Australia also experienced difficulties, including problems printing invoices and conducting online classes.
Microsoft said its investigation found that some servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, forcing traffic onto the remaining infrastructure and overwhelming a core process on affected servers.
The company said it attempted to ease the pressure by pausing deployments, redirecting traffic and restarting servers.
However, some servers became unresponsive again after traffic was redirected to them, making recovery more difficult.
Microsoft said it had not identified any malicious activity responsible for the outage.
The company added that it would publish a post-incident report outlining the root cause of the disruption and the corrective measures taken after the situation had been resolved.
