Microsoft 365 Outage Enters Its Second Day as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot Stay Down Worldwide

A worldwide Microsoft 365 outage that started on November 12 at around 18:00 UTC is still not fixed. Users have been unable to read or send email in Outlook, join Teams meetings, use Copilot, or reach cloud PCs, and Microsoft's own fixes have not restored service so far. At 12:00 UTC on November 13, Microsoft said users were still "unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services."

Microsoft says the outage affects Microsoft 365 services "that interact with Exchange Online and email services." Services that do not depend on Exchange Online keep working.

Which Microsoft 365 Services Are Affected

Microsoft's list of affected services is long, which is why the outage hits organizations so hard. It includes:

• Outlook email and calendars, and some parts of Teams
• Copilot, the Microsoft 365 admin center, and Microsoft 365 apps
• Intune, Planner, To Do, SharePoint Online, and Power Apps
• Defender for Office 365, Defender XDR, Purview, and Graph
• Windows 365, Universal Print, Fabric, and Education features

Parts of the UK government have had trouble sending and receiving email, and the NHS has reportedly been unable to offer online consultations to patients. Government offices in the US and other countries have reportedly been affected too. Xbox players also report sign in problems, digital games that do not launch, and failing cloud saves, even though the Xbox status page shows all services as working.

What Microsoft Says About the Cause

Microsoft first blamed a problem "that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable." A fix followed, but the company later admitted that "actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief." Attempts to add capacity by scaling up virtual machines ran into machines stuck in a bad state, which stopped the changes from syncing.

The company says it is still working to "pinpoint the underlying cause of the traffic influx." On the question of a cyberattack, Microsoft's latest statement reads: "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." It promises a full Post Incident Report with the root cause after the problem is fixed.

To protect email during recovery, Microsoft has extended the email timeout window to 48 hours. Microsoft says this is meant to preserve delayed messages, and the company is processing mail queues and backlogs first.

Microsoft's most recent update reports "positive results for service stability and increased capacity" after its latest traffic changes, and the company is applying them across affected regions. Administrators can follow the incident under ID MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or on the Microsoft 365 status page if the admin center does not load.

Microsoft has not given an estimated time for full recovery.