- Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams down for over five hours.
- OpenAI and Anthropic AI services also impacted by outage.
- Microsoft actively working on server recovery for affected users.
Microsoft Down Today: Thousands of users on Microsoft's platforms, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Microsoft 365, faced disruptions after the US tech giant was hit by an outage for hours in the wee hours of Friday. Around 1.3 lakh users on the outage tracker Downdetector reported issues accessing Outlook around 1 pm. Downdetector said Microsoft's outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour.
OpenAI's And Anthropic's AI Services Affected
Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for their users for more than five hours, with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services.
Microsoft's outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector. Microsoft says its Exchange Online incident began at 16:17 UTC. Reports to Downdetector about Outlook began climbing at about 17:25 UTC, 12:25 in New York. By 18:25, reports about five Microsoft services combined reached 19,650 a minute, against <15 a minute on an average Thursday. Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level. Reports did not stay in the Americas. They jumped tenfold in the UK at 17:43, in India at 23:21 local time and in New Zealand at 06:55 local time. Between 17:00 and 18:55 UTC, nearly 3 in 10 reports came from outside the US. We count a country here once its reports reach ten times normal and at least 20 in five minutes. Reports about Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold, and Azure about a hundredfold. Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn, also Microsoft's, rose far less. Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions. At 19:38 UTC, reports were still running at more than 11,000 a minute.
— Downdetector (@downdetector) November 12, 2026
What Microsoft Said On Outage
Microsoft said it was still working to return affected servers to service, and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 p.m. ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector.
The IT giant had earlier in the day pointed to several servers being unexpectedly unavailable due to the elevated load and not an increase in traffic.
"We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
By 5:47 p.m. ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 user, while there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector.
Users May Experience A Gradual Recovery: Microsoft
The restored servers had remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," Microsoft said in a statement.
AI Services Affected
OpenAI and Anthropic said their services have been affected due to the global outage. OpenAI stated it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
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Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
(With Agencies Inputs)