Access issues occurred on Thursday, November 12, in Microsoft's Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services. While the outage primarily affected users in the Americas, reports of malfunctions also came in from different regions.
According to Downdetector data, which tracks user reports, complaints for Outlook in the US exceeded 120,000 at approximately 1:30 PM Eastern Time; this number later rose above 130,000. A significant portion of the reports concerned the inability to access mailboxes, the inability to send and receive emails, and delays in message delivery.
More than 46,000 outage reports were also recorded across Microsoft 365. For Teams, which is widely used in the business world, approximately 3,000 users reported experiencing difficulty accessing the service. Outage complaints were also submitted for the company's artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot.
Microsoft announced in updates posted on X that it was investigating the source of the problem. The company stated that it had received reports that some users in the Americas were unable to access their Exchange Online mailboxes through various connection methods.
In a subsequent update, Microsoft stated that higher-than-normal load had been detected in a portion of its infrastructure and that this may have led to connection errors. The company reported that it was attempting to balance the load by redistributing traffic across its infrastructure to mitigate the impact.
Although it was announced that some issues seen earlier in the day in North America regarding Teams had been resolved, some users reported that connection problems persisted. Since Downdetector data is based on user reports, it does not definitively show the total number of people affected by the outage.
News Source: 12punto
