Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services are still down as exec expresses 'regret'

Microsoft 365 users reported a massive outage yesterday (November 12), affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot 365 and more. The company has been working on a fix for the issue, but there’s bad news if you were hoping for a solution.

Outlook users are still reporting an outage via Downdetector and social media. Furthermore, Microsoft’s own status page confirms that the problem hasn’t been addressed yet.

“Users may be unable to access or perform several actions in Microsoft 365 services,” the Redmond company explained. It noted that, in addition to Outlook, the issue affected OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft ToDo, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web.

Microsoft also outlined actions it had been taking to address the outage:

We appreciate your organization’s patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident.

As we’ve applied our current ongoing mitigation actions, we’ve observed a surge in outbound call volume from our routing services to our backend servers. This occurs when the backend servers outbound service cannot properly route to the backend machines. We’re continuing to observe heightened volume due to traffic rebalancing actions that we have taken throughout this event. We’re working on multiple workstreams to pinpoint the underlying cause of this traffic influx and address it.

Current actions we are taking include scaling up virtual machines to increase capacity and reduce load. Additionally, we’re querying for machines in a bad state to perform a force sync for our recent network change, which may improve service availability. However, we are encountering issues with the machines being stuck in a bad state, preventing our changes from syncing as expected. We’ll continue to monitor the effectiveness of changes applied so we can determine what refinements are necessary.

The status update also comes after Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna took to X to issue a statement:

We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.

In any event, we’ll update this article as soon as Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services are online again.