Microsoft users hit by mega outage; Outlook, Teams among services affected

New Delhi: Microsoft users on Friday continued to face disruptions while accessing different services, including Outlook, Copilot, Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365. Millions of users across Microsoft 365 services globally faced a mega outage that began on Thursday, Nov 12.

The US-based technology giant admitted that its fixes were not "working as expected" as thousands of users worldwide raised concerns. Businesses and organisations that depend on Microsoft-based services faced difficulties logging in to their work accounts.

Outlook users were unable to open their inboxes or view emails, thus causing a hindrance to their workflow.

According to monitoring website Downdetector, reports of issues with Outlook surged globally at 11:30 PM on Thursday. Initially, Microsoft reported, "returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far. We're also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery."

However, it was later reported that the servers could again become unresponsive once they received traffic. Additionally, the company limited the kind of traffic that could reach the affected infrastructure in some locations.

As per the latest update, the company is "identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances."

According to Microsoft, users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services, with features interacting with Exchange Online and email services being impacted.

Exchange Online users may be unable to access their mailboxes using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed, according to the company.

The Microsoft 365 admin center pages may also fail to load, while Microsoft 365 apps users may be unable to view recently used files.

Similarly, Microsoft Copilot 365 users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendars and files.

Microsoft Teams' core functionality, including joining calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages, was largely not impacted, the company said.

However, calendar-related failures, the creation of Live or Virtual events, Copilot responses and contact syncing were affected, it added.

Other impacted services include Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Defender XDR, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft To Do, Power BI, SharePoint Online, Universal Print and Windows 365.

(With inputs from IANS)