Microsoft 365 Down: Teams, Outlook and Copilot Fail for Businesses

Microsoft 365 business and enterprise services were failing on Thursday, Nov. 12, with users reporting trouble reaching Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR, according to Microsoft’s service health status page as cited by Mashable. The latest update Mashable reported was posted at 2:29 p.m. ET, and the company had not said service was restored.

The status page said the problems affect Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers and do not affect Microsoft’s consumer products.

Which services are affected

Mashable reported that Downdetector, an outage-tracking site, showed sharply higher problem reports for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Copilot, Microsoft 365, Azure and the Microsoft Store. Those are user reports counted by Downdetector, not confirmation from Microsoft. Microsoft’s own list of affected services is the one in the first paragraph.

The first Microsoft update described the problem as hitting email inboxes in the Americas. Later updates said other regions and products were affected too. In an update posted at 1:07 p.m. ET, the company said the issue may affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region, and pointed customers to the Microsoft 365 admin center under reference EX1550543.

What Microsoft says it is doing

Microsoft said in a status update that it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.” The company has paused all deployments and configuration changes as a precaution while it reviews recent changes for any connection to the event. It has also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to reduce load, with more traffic moves in progress.

At 1:07 p.m. ET Microsoft added that it had started redistributing connection traffic across its broader worldwide infrastructure to balance the load. Microsoft has not disclosed a cause.

What this means for Microsoft 365 customers

The outage reaches the tools many workplaces use for email, meetings, file sharing and security monitoring, and it is limited to business and enterprise accounts. Microsoft acknowledged the outage through its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.

Some customers may not be able to open the Microsoft 365 admin center, where the company normally posts incident details. Microsoft wrote on X that affected users should check the Microsoft service status webpage instead. Mashable reporters found that page was also down for them at the time of writing.

For help with individual apps once service returns, see our guides on what to check when Outlook is not working and which status page to check for Copilot problems.

What happens next

Mashable said it contacted Microsoft with questions about the outage and would update its story if the company responded. More detail is expected in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543 and on the Microsoft service status page.

Source: Mashable