A major outage began affecting Microsoft's services worldwide. For 12 hours, users across the globe experienced service disruptions that encompassed Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365, and SharePoint.
In the United States alone, reported incidents tallied 97,000 for Outlook, 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and 4,500 for Teams.
Microsoft services are beginning to come back online after a global outage left millions of users without access for nearly 18 hours. The disruption affected businesses, schools and government agencies in at least 74 countries, including the U.S., and impacted Outlook, Teams and Copilot. Microsoft said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack. Overwhelmed servers responsible for establishing secure connections were unable to process requests.
Microsoft clarified the root problem was an overload of server-availability processes, not a cyberattack. The company described how secure connection procedures were overwhelmed, causing a cascading inability to handle incoming traffic.
Microsoft extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to prevent message loss.
Microsoft began to report "early signs of stabilization". Engineers described the situation as achieving "marginal success" and noted that traffic-optimization and infrastructure-reboot efforts were yielding "positive results for service stability and increased capacity," though service capacity had not yet returned to normal levels.
Microsoft reports ‘positive results’ in restoring services after global outage https://t.co/LlI3Gk5RNR via @straits_times
Microsoft extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to prevent message loss.
Microsoft has explicitly stated that it found no evidence of malicious activity linked to the incident. The company reiterated that the outage was due to server capacity issues rather than an external cyberattack.
Global outage ? .@Microsoft today ain’t November 19th
Microsoft continues its recovery operations, treating the situation with "urgency and priority until full resolution." A comprehensive post-incident report will be released once services are fully restored.