Microsoft 365 outage continues as recovery efforts falter, disrupting Outlook, Teams and Copilot

Microsoft's efforts to restore its workplace services are taking longer than expected, leaving users facing continued disruptions across its productivity ecosystem. The company is still working to bring affected servers back online after earlier recovery attempts failed to deliver the expected results. The outage, which began on November 12, has affected access to Outlook, Exchange Online and several other Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Copilot and SharePoint.

In its latest update, Microsoft said that some servers initially brought back online were becoming unresponsive again once they started receiving traffic. The company is analysing diagnostic data with its networking and platform teams to understand what is triggering the problem.

Why is the Microsoft 365 outage continuing?

Microsoft is now temporarily restricting certain types of traffic reaching the affected infrastructure in specific locations. It is also rebuilding a subset of affected servers using an earlier software configuration to check whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive.

Earlier recovery attempts included restarting affected servers, moving traffic away from the affected infrastructure and testing an alternative method to check server health. However, these measures have not provided the expected relief.

Microsoft is now identifying alternative ways to increase capacity and manage traffic imbalances as it works towards restoring services. The company has acknowledged that its efforts to improve serviceability are "not taking as expected".

Which Microsoft services are affected?

The disruption primarily affects Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email service. Users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop using MAPI, Exchange ActiveSync or REST-based connections.

The wider Microsoft 365 disruption has also affected services such as Teams, Copilot and SharePoint. However, the impact may vary across individual applications and features, and not every function is necessarily unavailable.

Microsoft has not announced a confirmed timeline for complete restoration. The company is continuing to rebuild affected servers, manage incoming traffic and monitor infrastructure as it attempts to bring services back online.

Until the recovery process stabilises, users may continue to experience problems accessing their Microsoft 365 applications.