Microsoft said in a post on X on Friday, November 13, that it is "seeing broad recovery and stability" across its services after a disruption that began Thursday, November 12. "We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions," the company said, according to PYMNTS. Microsoft said the cause was a technical issue unrelated to a cyberattack, AI or agents, and that it restored services gradually to validate stability, which took longer. It said a full post-incident report will follow its review.
Bloomberg reported that Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft tools were affected. According to PYMNTS, citing a Bloomberg report, people in more than 70 countries have reported problems, and users began reporting issues around 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. Eastern on Thursday, Microsoft warned users they may still see errors, and the M365 bundle has more than 450 million commercial users.
Reuters reported that people turned to telephones, faxes and Bluetooth to cope with the loss of email. PYMNTS reported that firms told employees to use the phone, added capacity to teams to handle the extra workload, reminded staff not to use unauthorized channels and urged customers to verify unexpected communications. PYMNTS also reported that the outage broke connections that let other firms' AI assistants work with Microsoft 365.
