Update Friday 11/13 8am: Microsoft says it is making major progress restoring service this morning, after a devastating, massive global outage crippled workplace apps for more than twenty hours. Downdetector.com is a website that tracks outages of this kind, if you want to follow the repair process.
The disruption, which started Thursday afternoon across more than seventy countries, knocked out Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot AI. It delayed government operations, school communications, and business transactions worldwide.
In an update this morning, Microsoft says email delivery is finally getting back to normal levels, though some users may still see intermittent glitches or delayed messages.
Company engineers say the crash was caused by overwhelmed servers failing automated health checks—and not a cyberattack. While trying to be reassuring, it will likely take more than the word of company engineers to assuage a skeptical public. Microsoft says it will share a full report on what went wrong once systems are completely back online. As always, read, digest and judge for yourself.
Thursday Nov 12:
Maybe it wrecked your day at work–or maybe you were happy that Microsoft’s outage made it difficult to get work done. Maybe you thought it was just you–it wasn’t this time. It was a coast-to-coast disruption, and like asking your friends and colleagues ‘did you feel it?’ about an earthquake, you were probably asking, ‘did it hit you?’
The massive Microsoft outage Thursday disrupted businesses and millions of potential users across the country, raising new questions about America’s dependence on cloud computing. Microsoft Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 and even some artificial intelligence services experienced widespread problems.
At one point, nearly 130,000 Outlook outage reports were registered, with users unable to send emails, access files or connect to business applications.
Microsoft says unusually heavy demand and automated system checks apparently knocked servers offline, creating additional problems.
The company is rerouting traffic, restarting servers and testing changes to prevent more servers from being unnecessarily taken offline. But the underlying cause remains under investigation, and Microsoft has not announced a comprehensive long-term prevention plan.
The disruption highlights a growing vulnerability: when one technology giant experiences trouble, businesses, government agencies, and millions of customers can suddenly lose access to essential services.
And it could happen again. Did you feel it?
AI helped prepare this story
