Since the afternoon of 12 November, Microsoft 365 has suffered one of its biggest outages in recent years: Outlook and Exchange Online, parts of Teams, SharePoint and Copilot are failing worldwide. It is not a problem with your computer or your connection, and the fix is entirely in Microsoft's hands.
What happened
The incident began at around 17:15 (Spanish time) on Thursday 12 November. Within a few hours, Downdetector had logged more than 120,000 reports from Outlook users in dozens of countries. Microsoft is tracking it in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the IDs EX1550543 (Exchange Online) and MO1550821 (Microsoft 365).
Which services are affected
- Outlook and Exchange Online: on the web, desktop and mobile. This is the most affected service.
- Teams: the calendar and meeting scheduling are failing; chat, calls and meetings mostly work.
- Other services: SharePoint features that depend on Exchange, Copilot, Planner, To Do, Intune, Power BI and the Defender and Purview portals.
What caused it
According to Microsoft, many servers unexpectedly became unavailable and the rest could not absorb the load. Overnight it found that a core process on those servers was becoming overwhelmed and began reverting a recent network configuration change that coincides with the start of the problem. There is still no confirmed cause or final report, and nothing Microsoft has published points to a cyberattack.
Status early on 13 November
At 8:25 (Spanish time) on Friday 13 November the incident was still open, with no estimated resolution time. Overnight, the servers Microsoft recovered kept freezing again as soon as they received traffic. In its latest update, the company reported positive results after patching part of its infrastructure and said it was extending the patch to the remaining regions.
You can follow progress in real time at status.cloud.microsoft.
What you can do in the meantime
- Do not reinstall Office or change passwords. The fault is in Microsoft's servers: changing your computers will not fix it and may create new problems when the service comes back.
- Use another channel for anything urgent. Phone, messaging or an alternative email address for customers and suppliers.
- Do not lower your security. Do not disable multi-factor authentication or conditional access to see whether that makes it work.
- Be wary of recovery emails. Criminals take advantage of these outages to send fake Microsoft notices asking you to sign in again or verify your account.
- Expect delays. When the service returns to normal, some pending messages may arrive late.
Important: if you receive an email or a call claiming to come from Microsoft that asks you for passwords or codes to restore your account, it is a fraud attempt.
What to learn from this outage
No cloud service is immune to outages. It is worth having an alternative communication plan, a backup of email, OneDrive and SharePoint that is independent of Microsoft, and service health alerts set up to also reach an address outside Microsoft 365.
How we can help
We are following the incident closely and, once Microsoft declares it resolved, we will check that everything is working normally again in the environments we manage. If you need help with anything else, contact us as usual.