Microsoft Outage Enters Second Day as Service Improves and Shares Fall 1.4% Pre-Market

Key Facts

The Microsoft services outage entered its second day on Friday, November 13, affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot assistant among Microsoft 365 services, according to the Associated Press. The company said service availability and email delivery performance were improving across a growing share of the affected infrastructure. It reported broader improvement in North America and continued improvement across most of Europe, with encouraging signs of recovery in Asia-Pacific. In pre-market trading, Microsoft shares fell 1.4%, while AP described the disruption’s direct impact on markets as limited. Microsoft said it was seeing "initial stabilization and capacity improvement" as recovery efforts continued, without specifying when they would be complete.

The outage began at 16:17 UTC on November 12, according to the service health dashboard cited by CIO. AP had reported that the company flagged the issue 18 hours before its update published Friday, saying changes implemented to improve service had not gone as expected. During the disruption, Microsoft said parts of its infrastructure experienced heavy load and a number of servers failed automated health checks. It added that the alternatives used to bring them back online did not work immediately, describing an issue tied to infrastructure pressure and checks without limiting the cause to server failures alone. The company said it had paused deployments, diverted more traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarted affected servers as part of its efforts to restore service.

The list of affected services extended, according to CIO, to SharePoint Online, Defender XDR, Intune, Power BI and Purview services, in addition to Teams and Copilot. Reuters reported that the disruption also affected Microsoft 365 connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI services. Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems after 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, according to AP. Earlier that same day, Outlook reports on the tracker exceeded 97,000 at 2:07 p.m. Eastern Time, Reuters reported, noting that the number of reports does not necessarily equal the number of people actually affected. These figures reflect the volume of complaints recorded on the platform during Thursday, while the outage’s effects continued into Friday.

The outage’s effects extended beyond corporate environments: in Manchester, a trial was halted because of delays, and British police said they were unable to receive crime reports online, according to AP. The National Pharmacy Association in Britain warned that disruption to the National Health Service’s email systems could delay people getting their prescriptions. A Japanese government spokesman also said government information technology infrastructure had been affected and that the government was monitoring developments. These incidents highlight the reliance of administrative work and public services on the affected communications and email tools, with consequences varying by organization and service. The recovery statement did not specify when services would return to normal.

Microsoft said it had no indication that the outage resulted from malicious activity and that it would address the incident with urgency and priority until it was fully resolved. AP quoted Australia’s home affairs minister as saying Microsoft had likened the disruption to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024; the agency attributed the comparison to the minister, not to a public explanation by the company of the cause of the current incident. On the scale of the service, Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to Microsoft 365, while AP reported that more than 430 million people use the platform’s applications. The figures measure different things—the customer base and usage—and do not identify the number of people affected by the outage. The company warned that intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery could continue as it applies mitigation measures to the remaining infrastructure.