Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot services faced a major global disruption on Thursday, affecting businesses and employees that depend on the company’s productivity platforms.
Downdetector recorded a peak of around 200,000 reports concerning problems across Microsoft services shortly after 1pm New York time. New complaints later declined for services including Outlook and Copilot, although the drop did not confirm that normal operations had resumed.
Microsoft said its efforts to restart the affected services and servers were producing positive results. The company added that it would broaden its remediation measures after confirming that the changes already applied were stable.
The company also deployed fixes on malfunctioning systems and began routing user traffic away from affected servers. In an update issued shortly after 6pm New York time, Microsoft said it had observed “limited recovery in some regions.”
Other businesses report disruption
The outage affected companies that rely on Microsoft infrastructure and services, including OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI said it was examining a problem involving Microsoft connectors and cautioned that new connections could fail while some tools might not function as expected.
Anthropic also detected an issue involving an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the announcement of its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruption linked to the Microsoft outage.
Employees turn to alternative communication channels
Microsoft’s own office operations were also affected as employees struggled to access key applications such as Outlook and Teams. With Microsoft 365 services unavailable, many workers used Slack and telephone calls to communicate and share updates.
Users also posted about the disruption on social media, with some joking that the outage had brought an early weekend because they could not access Microsoft 365 applications.
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