Microsoft 365 experienced a significant outage on Thursday, 12 November, with business accounts and Exchange Online connectivity among the main areas affected.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to infrastructure overload and investigated an unexpected rise in a type of internet traffic.
Recovery steps included server restarts, traffic rerouting and a temporary pause on new deployments.
Microsoft confirmed that the outage was due to increased load on parts of its infrastructure. In its initial statements, the company said that it was investigating an unexpected increase in a specific type of Internet traffic, which may have caused the systems to become overloaded. As a response, Microsoft restarted servers, transferred traffic to alternative infrastructure and suspended deployments of new updates.
The extent of the incident was captured through the Downdetector platform, where reports for Outlook approached 130.000, while thousands of additional reports were recorded for Teams, Copilot and other services. The malfunction also affected the interconnection of third-party platforms with Microsoft services. For example, OpenAI reported problems with links to Microsoft systems, which prevented new connections, while corresponding infrastructure problems were also recorded by Anthropic.
Despite the immediate activation of technical support teams, Microsoft did not initially provide a specific timeline for full restoration, nor did it clarify the definitive cause of the sudden load on its systems. The incident highlights the strong dependence of modern work environments on central cloud computing infrastructures, where applications and files are provided via the Internet, making any technical failure of a central provider particularly critical for the operation of businesses.
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