Microsoft says patch shows progress in global outage

Microsoft said early Friday, November 13, that it was seeing "positive results" after applying a patch, but it had not yet confirmed a full recovery from a global Microsoft 365 outage. The outage began Thursday afternoon and kept Outlook, Teams and Copilot unreliable for many users for more than 12 hours. "We're seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure," Microsoft ↗ 0.36% said on its service health page, adding that it would extend the patch to more servers, according to The Indian Express. The company also cited "positive results for service stability and increased capacity" from traffic optimization, Dow Jones reported.morningstar.com+1

Those updates came a few hours after the company admitted that earlier fixes had failed. At 3:13 a.m. GMT, Microsoft wrote that its changes were "not taking as expected," CNN reported.us.cnn.com

How the outage unfolded

Microsoft first said it was looking into mailbox access problems at 12:54 p.m. ET on Thursday, according to Dow Jones. Just after 1 p.m., nearly 130,000 users had reported Outlook problems on Downdetector, the AP reported. Within about an hour, reports had come in from 74 countries and territories, CNN reported.apnews.com+2

Microsoft first blamed "elevated load." It then said that load was "not driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure," The Independent reported. On Thursday night, the company said "a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed," and that it had begun reverting a recent network configuration change, according to ABC7. Some servers it brought back online stopped responding again once traffic returned, ABC News reported.abc7.com+2

Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity," The Next Web reported.thenextweb.com

Governments, schools and AI tools

The outage reached public institutions on several continents. In Japan, deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki said the government's IT infrastructure had been affected, according to Sky News. The UK Parliament put "alternative communication arrangements" in place, the BBC reported.news.sky.com+1

In Australia, schools, courts and government services started Friday without working email, CNN reported. Bankers at Morgan Stanley ↘ 0.76% and Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ↘ 1.43% in Hong Kong also said their work was disrupted. US city governments from Miami Beach to Austin told residents to phone instead of emailing, The Next Web reported.edition.cnn.com+1

AI companies that connect to Microsoft 365 were hit too. OpenAI said new connections through its Microsoft connectors might break, and Anthropic pointed to an upstream provider issue affecting its Microsoft 365 connector, The Independent reported.independent.co.uk

As of 3:20 a.m. ET on Friday, Microsoft's status site still showed "service degradation," Dow Jones reported. The company has not said when service will be fully restored.morningstar.com