Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 5:22 p.m. ET — The outage continued into the evening, as Microsoft provided its latest update: "We’re opening all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief."
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 4:21 p.m. ET — On its status page and X account, Microsoft said it has potentially identified some "contributors" to the problem and was deploying fixes. The company said some servers were already back online.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 3:10 p.m. ET — On its Microsoft 365 Status account on X, the company said it's deploying multiple mitigations to restore service.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 2:29 p.m. ET — According to the latest updates on the Microsoft service health status webpage, the current issues affect Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers, not Microsoft's consumer tech products.
Updated on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 12:37 p.m. ET — As of this writing, users in multiple regions are still having trouble accessing Microsoft 365.
Microsoft customers are reporting problems accessing a variety of the company's software products and services on Thursday afternoon.
What services are affected by the ongoing Microsoft outage? The company's server status page stated that users may have trouble accessing Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR.
A recent update indicated the company was actively deploying fixes.
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"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," the company wrote in an update to users. "As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress."
In addition to the updates from Microsoft itself, Downdetector shows sharply elevated user reports for the following Microsoft services:
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Copilot AI
Microsoft 365
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Store
The company initially acknowledged an outage at 12:54 p.m. ET through its Microsoft 365 Status account on X:
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While the initial update indicated the outage was impacting email inboxes "in the Americas," later updates confirmed that other regions and products were also being impacted.
An update posted at 1:07 p.m. ET stated: "We've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543." The company added, "We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load."
The problem was so severe that some customers may not be able to access the Microsoft 365 admin center at all, as the company wrote on X that users should instead refer to the Microsoft service status webpage. However, this page was also down for part of the day, according to multiple Mashable reporters.
In another update, posted at 2:50 p.m. ET, the company said it was "testing a configuration change to address a problem that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable." The company said it is also restarting affected servers in an attempt to restore service.
Later, at 4:06 p.m. ET, Microsoft said it had deployed a fix that allowed some servers to go back online. Beyond that, the company has identified some minor configuration changes that may help explain the ongoing outage.
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However, as the standard workday drew to a close on Thursday evening, Microsoft 365 remained down for many users. In its most recent update on X, the company acknowledged its earlier efforts had failed to restore service.
"We’re opening all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief."
Mashable contacted Microsoft with questions about the outage, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.
This is a developing story...
