Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Teams, Outlook and Copilot Services

A widespread global outage affecting Microsoft services, including Teams, Outlook and Copilot, has disrupted access for millions of users across several countries. The disruption has also affected Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive, impacting businesses, government agencies and individual users.

Microsoft has reported some progress in restoring its services after applying a patch to a section of its infrastructure. The company said it was seeing “positive results” in improving server stability but continued to monitor the effectiveness of the changes before extending the fix to additional servers across affected regions.

Users in India, Australia, Taiwan and several other countries reported difficulties accessing Microsoft's applications. To address the disruption, the company is also deploying additional virtual machines (VMs) to increase infrastructure capacity, manage sustained traffic and reduce pressure on its servers.

Microsoft said it had found no evidence of malicious activity behind the outage. However, it has not provided a definite timeline for the complete restoration of services. The company has also committed to publishing a detailed post-incident report explaining the root cause of the disruption and the steps being taken to prevent similar incidents.

Earlier, Microsoft acknowledged that some machines were stuck in a “bad state”, preventing changes from synchronising as expected. The company said it was exploring alternative measures to improve service capacity and address infrastructure-related issues.

Outage Affects Millions of Users Worldwide

The disruption was first reported on November 12, around 7:40 am Pacific Time, after Microsoft flagged issues with Teams in the North American region. The problem subsequently affected several services across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

According to the BBC, citing tracking platforms, approximately 3-4 million businesses use Microsoft 365 applications. The outage has potentially affected hundreds of millions of users who depend on these services for communication, collaboration and daily operations.

Microsoft has said it will continue treating the incident as a priority until all affected services are fully restored.