Microsoft said on Friday it was still working to restore workplace services worldwide after an outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot on Thursday, 12 November. The company reported improvements in stability and capacity, but its recovery efforts had yet to deliver sustained results.
Microsoft extended its email timeout to 48 hours to help preserve delayed messages while engineers worked on the disruption.
“We’re seeing early stabilisation and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue. To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours,” the company said on X on Friday.
The disruption affected its Microsoft 365 productivity suite, including email and collaboration tools. Microsoft also identified problems with services used by technology teams, including cyber security software, file-sharing services and administrator tools.
Servers remain the focus
Microsoft said the load on its systems came from servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable, rather than a rise in traffic. Its investigation pointed to a component responsible for processing server health as a possible source of failed health checks.
The company said it had acted to stop more servers being affected while bringing others back into service. Earlier attempts to redistribute traffic and change traffic protocols produced partial recovery in some regions, but the gains did not hold.
By Friday, Microsoft said its latest traffic changes were improving service stability and capacity, prompting it to apply them across more affected regions.
The recovery remained difficult. More than seven hours after the problem was first reported, Microsoft warned that some servers brought back online could stop responding once traffic reached them.
Reports span 74 countries and territories
Downdetector said outage reports reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on November 12. Within two hours, reports across five Microsoft services reached 19,650 a minute, against fewer than 15 a minute on an average Thursday.
Outlook reports peaked at more than 2,000 times their usual level, according to the monitoring service. Microsoft classified the Outlook problem as a service degradation.
The disruption also reached public services. Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget said the state was experiencing problems with email and other Microsoft applications because of the Microsoft 365 outage across North America. It warned that email responses could be delayed.
