Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Teams for thousands, including S’pore users

• Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams were disrupted for more than five hours, with thousands affected, including users in Singapore. Microsoft said it was investigating Exchange Online issues and restoring servers.
• Outage reports peaked at 138,058 for Outlook and later eased, but problems remained in Singapore. Microsoft said users would see a “gradual recovery” as clients reconnected.
• The outage also hit OpenAI and Anthropic Microsoft connectors, and delayed Workhorse Group’s results. It shows how Microsoft failures can disrupt business and AI services worldwide.

Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Nov 12, with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services.

As at 6pm ET (7am on Nov 13, Singapore time), 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 1pm ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector.

In Singapore, the outage tracker began recording reports at about 2am overnight, with numbers continuing to climb on the morning of Nov 13.

As at 9.15am, there were 1,130 outage reports for Microsoft Outlook, up from about 730 an hour earlier.

Outage reports for Microsoft 365 were also on the rise, climbing from 434 at 8.30am to 566 at 9.20am.

Dozens of users here also reported issues with Microsoft Teams and Copilot.

The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable for 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 5.47pm ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 users. Meanwhile, there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector.

The tech giant said then that the restored servers had remained stable so far. It added 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.

Businesses feel the impact

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.

Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

Microsoft in October reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant’s suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Electric lorry maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on Nov 12, rescheduled it to Nov 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage. REUTERS