The disruption lasted more than 12 hours, affecting millions of users across multiple regions and exposing the growing dependence of businesses, public institutions and essential services on cloud-based technology.
A major global outage affecting Microsoft’s cloud-based services has disrupted businesses, schools, government agencies and financial institutions across several countries, leaving millions of users unable to access essential workplace communication and productivity tools.
The disruption, which began around midday on Thursday, the 12th of November, affected Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 and Copilot. The incident continued for more than 12 hours, making it one of the company’s most significant service disruptions in recent years.
Microsoft initially reported connectivity problems affecting Exchange Online, its cloud-based email service, before confirming that the disruption extended to other services dependent on its email infrastructure, by early Friday, the 13th of November, the company was still working to restore normal operations, although it reported signs of stabilisation following several recovery attempts.
Microsoft attributed the outage to problems within its server infrastructure rather than a surge in customer traffic or a confirmed cyberattack.
The company initially identified failed health checks affecting a component responsible for monitoring server conditions. Further investigation revealed that a core process on affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, resulting in capacity loss and connectivity failures.
Microsoft attempted to restore services by restarting affected servers, redirecting traffic to alternative routes and isolating parts of its infrastructure. However, some servers became unresponsive again when traffic was reintroduced, complicating the recovery process.
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