Microsoft’s hours-long outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot; recovery remained partial as restored servers risked becoming unresponsive under traffic.

The supplied reports describe disruption to Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot during much of the November 12 U.S. working day. Microsoft said its investigation centered on Exchange Online, with some servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable and increasing load on the remaining infrastructure.

Microsoft reported pausing deployments, diverting traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restarting affected servers. It subsequently validated an alternative service-health check, simplified the restoration process, and reported partial recovery as clients reconnected.

A later update warned that servers restored to service could become unresponsive again when receiving traffic. Microsoft therefore temporarily restricted certain traffic types reaching affected infrastructure in some regions; the supplied updates do not establish full service restoration.

A CCTV report relayed by Financial_Express put peak Outlook problem reports at 138,058, declining to approximately 34,490 by evening; these are outage-tracker reports, not a verified count of distinct affected users. The report also described disruption to Microsoft-connected components used by OpenAI and Anthropic services, while OpenAI separately acknowledged problems with new Microsoft connector connections and associated tools.