It’s not you, calm down, it’s Outlook. The problems continue this Friday, November 13, after an incident in Microsoft services began during Thursday afternoon and spread to different regions. The outage affects access to email and several Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams, Copilot, and SharePoint. The company continues working to recover the infrastructure and stabilize the operation of its servers, without having yet communicated a time for full restoration.
The disruption began at 17:17 on Thursday, in Spanish peninsular time, according to Microsoft’s incident log. At first, the tech company identified problems in several regions of America, although it later warned that the scope could be international. The failures continued through the night and also reached users in Europe and Asia.
The latest technical update consulted, published by Microsoft at 06:16 UTC on Friday, indicated that the teams were still working on recovering the Exchange Online servers, the infrastructure that supports Outlook email. The company was testing different measures to increase available capacity and prevent connections from again saturating the systems that remained operational.
Outlook is not the only affected service
The problems extend to several applications within the Microsoft 365 environment. In Outlook, users may find difficulties accessing their mailboxes from the web and the applications, as well as delays in receiving and delivering messages. The incident also affects certain Teams features, especially those related to the calendar, scheduling meetings, and invitations.
Copilot logs errors when loading chat or generating responses, as well as difficulties retrieving information from emails, calendars, and files. In SharePoint, the failures are concentrated in functions that depend on Exchange Online, while direct access to documents stored continues to be available. Microsoft has also pointed to problems in tools such as To Do, Planner, and some Defender features.
The impact has reached different countries. In the United States, Downdetector recorded close to 130,000 reports of problems related to Outlook during Thursday afternoon, in addition to thousands of notifications about Teams and Copilot. These figures correspond to reports sent by users to the platform and do not represent an official count of people affected.
Microsoft tries to recover the capacity of its servers
The company has explained that it detected high load in different regions and that some servers stopped passing automatic operating checks. The loss of capacity caused a greater amount of traffic to be directed toward the machines that were still operating, which compounded connection difficulties.
During recovery work, Microsoft also found problems distributing connections evenly among its servers. The company is expanding the capacity of virtual machines, adjusting traffic protocols, and testing alternative routes to reduce pressure on the Exchange Online infrastructure.
Microsoft says that, until the latest update consulted, it had not found signs of malicious activity as the source of the incident. The company has announced that it will publish a later report to explain the root cause of the problem and detail the measures it will take to prevent it from happening again.
While the work continues, the company has not offered a definitive timeline for restoring all services. The progression of the incident can be consulted on the official status panel of Microsoft 365, where technical updates about the affected systems are published.