Microsoft outage day 2: Outlook and Teams still down, no cyberattack

Microsoft’s global outage ran into a second day on Friday, 13 November, with millions of people still unable to use Outlook email, Teams and other Microsoft 365 tools. The company says the problem was not a cyberattack, but it has not yet said exactly what caused it.

What is down?

The trouble began on Thursday, 12 November. Microsoft’s own service notice named Outlook and Outlook.com, Teams, OneDrive, OneNote, To Do and Microsoft 365 on the web, and Copilot was also affected, ABC News reported. NBC News said more than a dozen Microsoft cloud services were hit, for both businesses and home users.

At the peak, Downdetector logged close to 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook. By Thursday afternoon US time there were still more than 24,000 Outlook reports and 8,000 for Microsoft 365. Users in Pakistan, India, the UK and the US reported failures on social media.

What caused the Microsoft outage?

Microsoft said several of its servers became “unexpectedly unavailable”, and the rest then had to carry extra traffic and became overloaded. It described the problem as “elevated load” and said it would explain the root cause in a report once the fix is complete.

Microsoft said it had ruled out a cyber-security incident, and one of its executives confirmed there had been no breach. Reports also say Microsoft was reversing a recent network configuration change made around the time the trouble started, to see whether it played a part. That has not been confirmed as the cause.

Is it fixed?

Not fully. Microsoft paused updates, moved traffic away from struggling servers and restored Teams in North America on Thursday, though some users still had problems. On Thursday evening US time it said restored servers were stable, then warned they could stop responding again once traffic returned, TechRadar reported. Its latest update said it was testing a configuration change on some servers before a wider rollout, and NBC News reported Microsoft said early Friday it was seeing “positive results.”

What to do if Outlook or Teams is not working

• Check Microsoft’s 365 service status page or its Microsoft 365 Status account on X before resetting anything; the fault is on Microsoft’s side.
• Don’t change your password or reinstall Office because of this outage; it will not help.
• The Outlook phone app or desktop app sometimes works when the web version does not, and messages already downloaded stay readable.
• For urgent work, use WhatsApp, Gmail or phone and tell clients why.
• Be careful of emails or calls claiming to “fix” your Microsoft account. Scammers use big outages to send fake login links.

Why it matters in Pakistan

Many Pakistani banks, offices, universities and freelancers working for foreign clients run on Microsoft 365. A two-day outage means missed messages and delayed work, at the end of the working week.

Microsoft has promised a full post-incident report once service is back.