Microsoft says Outlook, Teams restored after global outage

Microsoft ↗ 0.17% said early Saturday, November 14, that Outlook, Teams and its other workplace services had fully recovered. The announcement ended a global outage that disrupted communications for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours. "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the company posted on X, according to CBC. CNET reported that the message went out around 1 a.m. ET.cbc.ca+1

Problems began Thursday, November 12. The outage eased Friday after nearly 24 hours of disruption that pushed some organizations back to fax machines and stopped at least one European bond repurchase, Reuters reported. Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, was also affected.qconline.com

What went wrong

Microsoft said server issues caused the outage. It said it was not aware of any malicious activity and ruled out AI as the cause. The company earlier said a process "responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests." It later traced the incident to "an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change". The failure centered on Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud email and scheduling hub. Applications that don't rely on it kept working.abc13.com+1

Government agencies from Australia and Japan to the United States were affected. Trading firms saw delays, some companies couldn't publish earnings on time, and airlines warned customers about slow communications. In Britain, police forces, the NHS, courts and schools were among those hit. Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, according to its parent company Ookla Ziff Davis, Inc. ↘ 0.39%. "It shows how much of the working day now runs through one provider's email and collaboration tools," said Luke Kehoe, Ookla's lead industry analyst.cbc.ca+1

Limited insured losses

Mario De Cicco, a vice president at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses at $300 million to $500 million. That is well below the $400 million to $1.5 billion toll of the 2024 CrowdStrike ↘ 1.42% outage, which crashed more than 8 million Windows computers. Microsoft shares closed flat on Friday.cbc.ca+1

Repeated disruptions

This was one of the longest outages in Microsoft's history. It follows a Microsoft 365 outage in January and an Azure cloud outage last month. "If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro. Some analysts doubt customers will switch, given how costly it is to replace tools built so deeply into daily work.cbc.ca