Daijiworld Media Network – New Delhi
New Delhi, Nov 14: Microsoft has resolved a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and several other Microsoft 365 services for more than 36 hours, restoring access to millions of users across more than 70 countries.
The company announced early on Saturday that it had completed efforts to address the technical issue behind the disruption. It said customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should no longer experience problems, while monitoring of its infrastructure and delayed email queues would continue.
The outage began on Thursday, November 12, when users reported difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes. The disruption subsequently affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, Planner and To Do.
Although core messaging and online meetings on Teams largely continued to function, features linked to Exchange Online, such as calendars and meeting scheduling, were affected. Copilot users also faced difficulties loading chats and accessing work-related information, including emails, calendars and files.
Microsoft traced the disruption to a technical issue linked to an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a subsequent network change. The company ruled out a cyberattack or an artificial intelligence agent as the cause.
The outage affected businesses, government institutions and individual users. Several organisations faced difficulties communicating with customers, accessing information and carrying out routine operations.
In India, IndiGo said its email support services had been affected and warned that it might not receive customer emails. The airline advised passengers requiring urgent assistance to use its website or mobile application. Air India, meanwhile, said its flight operations remained unaffected and that it had rerouted email traffic to maintain customer communication.
OpenAI and Anthropic also reported issues with their Microsoft 365 connectors, which enable their services to access workplace information.
Microsoft said services were restored gradually, with stability being checked at each stage. It also extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages while processing backlogs.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” the company said, adding that it took the trust of its customers seriously.
Microsoft is continuing to monitor its systems and email queues. It has promised to release a detailed post-incident report explaining the cause of the outage and the steps taken to resolve it.
The disruption has once again highlighted the dependence of businesses and institutions on major cloud service providers and the need for contingency plans in the event of prolonged technology failures.