Microsoft Outage Stretches Past 12 Hours With No Timeline for Full Recovery

A major Microsoft 365 outage has stretched to around 12 hours, disrupting Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams and other services across multiple regions, and Microsoft has not said when full service will return.

Despite several recovery attempts, Microsoft says its efforts to restore normal service are not progressing as expected. In its latest update on X, Microsoft 365 Status said it had monitored the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they were not taking effect as hoped.

The company said it is now identifying alternate workstreams to add capacity while traffic management remains imbalanced.

Servers failing, not a surge in users

Microsoft has said the heavy load on its infrastructure is not the result of unusually high user traffic. Instead, a number of servers unexpectedly became unavailable, which put extra pressure on those still running.

The disruption has blocked access to Exchange Online mailboxes. Users have also reported connection problems with Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams through a range of access methods. Microsoft has listed SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR among the affected services. The incidents are tracked in the Microsoft 365 admin center as EX1550543 and MO1550821.

ASIO and the AFP affected in Australia

Australia’s spy agency and its federal police were among the organisations caught up in the outage on Friday. At a news conference, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed their organisations had been affected.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had told him it did not believe the outage was caused by a cyber attack.

Burke said the government has activated an agreement with Microsoft to make sure Australia is prioritised in the restoration of services. It was the first of the formal cyber agreements he has signed on behalf of Australia. “That agreement has in fact been activated today,” he said, to ensure appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests.

Hundreds of thousands of reports

The first reports emerged on Thursday, 12 November, US time. Downdetector recorded more than 97,000 Outlook problem reports in the United States, along with over 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 for Teams. At its peak the Outlook tally reached roughly 130,000 reports, according to one count.

Partial recovery has not held

Microsoft has reported limited recovery after returning some affected servers to service, but at one point said the improvement was not being sustained across regions. Some restored servers have reportedly failed again.

Microsoft has not given an estimated time for full recovery, and the root cause has not been confirmed.

This is a developing story and will be updated as Microsoft provides more information.

*Tech on Greek City Times

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