Microsoft Outlook and Teams Down: Exec Says No Sign of Cyberattack

Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services went down for users around the world on Thursday, Nov. 12, with problems first reported after midday Eastern time, according to The Economic Times, citing reports from the news agency AP. A Microsoft executive said late Thursday that there was no sign the outage came from a cyberattack.

The disruption ran into the night, The Economic Times reported, and affected many companies and some government operations. Microsoft has not said what caused it or when service would be fully restored.

What stopped working

Outlook was hit hardest. Users said they could not send or receive email, and some could not get their inboxes to load at all, according to AP as cited by The Economic Times. Others ran into errors in Teams, Microsoft’s meeting and chat tool.

Thousands of people also reported trouble with Copilot, the company’s AI assistant, and with the wider Microsoft 365 suite of apps, the outlet said.

On the outage tracker Downdetector, as many as 130,000 users reported problems reaching Outlook just after 1 pm EST, AP reported. Downdetector counts reflect user reports, not confirmed numbers of affected accounts. AP said fresh reports later fell from that peak, though many users were still describing problems with email.

Microsoft says no indication of malicious activity

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, addressed the outage in a post on X late Thursday. He said the company regretted the disruption to customers and was working on the issue.

Lamanna said there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.” He added that Microsoft would share more information as soon as it had it.

That statement rules out a cyberattack based on what the company knows so far. It does not explain what did go wrong, and Microsoft has not published a cause.

What it means for people who rely on Outlook and Teams

For workers whose day runs through Outlook and Teams, the outage meant missed or delayed email and meetings that would not start or connect properly. Because the problems began in the middle of the U.S. working day and lasted into the night, they reached offices, businesses and some government services that depend on Microsoft 365.

Many of the people affected had no way to tell whether the fault was on their side. Our guides on checking Microsoft service health when Outlook is not working and fixing Teams when it will not load or sign in walk through the basic checks, such as looking at Microsoft’s own status information before changing settings on a device.

Is the outage over?

Microsoft had not announced a full recovery as of late Thursday. Lamanna’s post said the company was still working to address the issue, and AP reported that while new complaints had dropped from their peak, users were still unable to send or receive email or load their inboxes.

Microsoft has not said which systems failed, how many customers were affected or when all services would be back to normal. The company said it would share more details as it gets them.

Source: The Economic Times