Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook and Teams access across 74 countries

A Microsoft 365 outage disrupted access to Outlook, Teams and Copilot across 74 countries and territories on 13 and 14 November, with users in the UAE among those affected. Downdetector recorded around 140,000 reports of problems with Outlook globally around 18:00 GMT on Thursday, with complaints in the United States alone approaching 130,000 shortly after that time, according to Gulf News and Economy Middle East.

Connectivity errors in Exchange Online infrastructure#

Microsoft attributed the disruption to connectivity errors in part of its Exchange Online infrastructure, which processes requests from users attempting to reach their accounts. The company stated that a portion of infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, contributing to the connectivity problems. Users reported difficulties sending and receiving emails, accessing mailboxes and connecting to Teams. Some also encountered problems viewing files and accessing calendar information. Microsoft said several servers became unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional pressure on remaining infrastructure, according to Economy Middle East.

Initial fixes failed to deliver expected results#

Microsoft said on Thursday that steps taken to fix the outage were not proceeding as expected and that it was working on alternative solutions. In an update published at 02:54 GMT on Friday, the company said its latest corrective measures had not delivered the expected results and that it was exploring alternative approaches. Microsoft paused deployments, moved traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted servers, but some servers that had been restarted became unresponsive again when normal traffic returned. The company subsequently reported limited recovery and cautioned that users might observe services returning gradually as their applications reconnected, Gulf News reported.

UAE users reported problems on Friday morning#

Downdetector's UAE site recorded Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams as the three most reported services on Friday morning, with sharp increases in complaints logged as of 08:42 local time, according to Gulf News. The disruption began on Thursday when Microsoft first said it was investigating reports of problems in the Americas, later widening that to say the issue was affecting Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region. The incident also affected technology companies relying on Microsoft's infrastructure, with OpenAI and Anthropic both reporting disruptions linked to Microsoft 365 connections, Economy Middle East reported.

Recovery process extended into Friday#

Microsoft said it was aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact and cautioned that services that appeared to have recovered could become unresponsive again, with customers in different regions potentially experiencing further interruptions. The company stated it was reviewing network logs to identify the source of the problem and identifying alternate workstreams that could be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. By 18:00 Eastern Time on Thursday, reports on Downdetector had fallen to about 37,000, Gulf News reported.