Microsoft 365 outage: When will Outlook and Teams be back online?
Millions of Microsoft users face continued disruption to Outlook and Microsoft 365 after a widespread outage on November 12. The company has begun restoring services but has not announced when everything will be working normally again.
In an update issued at 6:02 a.m. CET on 13 November, Microsoft said some regions were recovering after engineers adjusted network traffic and restarted the affected servers. However, the improvements have not been consistent, leaving users without a clear restoration timeline.
The problems began on Thursday when servers supporting Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud email system, unexpectedly stopped responding.
According to Reuters, the disruption affected businesses and government agencies across multiple countries, including the United States, Australia, India and Japan.
At its peak, outage tracker Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States. Users complained about being unable to open their inboxes, send messages or receive emails.
When will Microsoft services work again?
Microsoft has not provided an estimated time for full recovery. Its engineers identified a problem with servers becoming overloaded while establishing secure connections, causing them to stop processing requests.
Some attempts to bring servers back online failed when normal traffic returned. The company is now adjusting how it routes connections and testing configuration changes to keep the infrastructure stable.
Outlook and Exchange Online remain the worst affected. Other Microsoft products, including OneDrive, SharePoint, Copilot and Teams, have experienced disruptions to features that depend on email services.
However, Microsoft says most Teams chats and video meetings are functioning normally, while files stored directly in SharePoint remain accessible.
The company’s investigation has found no indication of malicious activity or a cyberattack.
Users can monitor Microsoft’s official service health page for updates. Businesses with administrator access can also check the Microsoft 365 admin centre for incident reports.
For those still unable to access Outlook, switching between the web and desktop versions may not solve the problem because the disruption affects the underlying email service. Until Microsoft restores stable server connections, some users may continue experiencing intermittent access and delayed messages.
