Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams for hours, affects AI connectors
A Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and other services for thousands of users for over five hours on Thursday 13 November, also affecting connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft said it was restoring servers gradually, while the electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its
A widespread outage of Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, disrupted thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday 13 November, the company said. The outage also affected connectors used by the artificial-intelligence services of OpenAI and Anthropic.
As of 6 p.m. Eastern Time, Microsoft said it was still working to return affected servers to service and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. According to Downdetector, reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 p.m. ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening.
Earlier in the day, Microsoft pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable for the elevated load and not an increase in traffic. “We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
By 5:47 p.m. ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 users, while there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector. The tech giant said the restored servers had remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online. “As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a statement.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The outage also caused business disruptions. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on 12 November, rescheduled it to 16 November citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage. Last month, Microsoft reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant’s suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.