Microsoft Outage Hits Millions Worldwide as Outlook and Teams Go Down

Microsoft's Building 92 at its Redmond campus. Photo: Coolcaesar, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Representative image.

Millions of people around the world started their Friday without email. A major outage in Microsoft 365 knocked out Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other workplace tools on Thursday night, and the disruption was still continuing into Friday. From offices and banks to airports, the failure showed just how deeply everyday work now depends on a handful of cloud services. In India, the outage even grounded flights, with SpiceJet cancelling three services out of Delhi.

What Went Down — and When

The first complaints appeared on outage tracker Downdetector at 11.02 pm IST on Thursday, 12 November. Within an hour, the disruption had gone global, hitting users in 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at nearly 140,000 on Thursday evening.

The affected services include Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Exchange Online mailboxes — the email, chat, file storage and AI tools millions of offices run on daily. The outage continued into Friday morning, with users still reporting problems more than 12 hours after it began.

Microsoft Says the Fix Is Not Working as Expected

Microsoft acknowledged the problem through its Microsoft 365 Status account, but its updates have been cautious. The company said the changes introduced to restore its disrupted cloud services were not working as expected, and that its teams were working on alternative solutions. In a statement issued at 3.30 am on Friday, Microsoft reported "marginal success" in resolving the issue.

The company has also ruled out foul play. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said the outage was not caused by any malicious or hacking activity, and Microsoft clarified that it was not a cybersecurity breach. The incidents are being tracked under the references EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

Flights Cancelled in India as Airlines Feel the Impact

In India, the outage reached beyond office inboxes and into aviation. SpiceJet cancelled three flights departing from Delhi on Friday morning — Delhi to Pune, Delhi to Leh and Delhi to Mumbai — and delayed two others, Delhi to Darbhanga and another Delhi to Mumbai service.

IndiGo and Akasa Air told passengers that their email support services had been hit by the global disruption and might not be able to receive customer emails. Both airlines issued advisories asking passengers to keep a close watch on flight updates. Air India, meanwhile, said it was closely monitoring the situation but confirmed that its flight operations and communication channels remained unaffected.

The impact spread wider still. Banks, government offices and courts in several countries reported disruptions, Australia's spy agency said its services were affected, and even AI platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic felt the knock-on effects through their Microsoft 365 connectors.

Conclusion

For now, offices, airlines and government departments around the world are waiting for the all-clear. The outage may not have been caused by hackers, but its scale has already made it one of the biggest technology failures of the year. The real test will be how quickly Microsoft can restore normal service — and what backup plans workplaces put in place for the next time a single cloud platform goes dark.

Were you hit by the Microsoft outage today? Tell us in the comments how your workday was affected.