Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot, were still experiencing disruptions on Friday, November 13, after a widespread outage began the previous day. Microsoft said some affected servers had returned to service, but it was still working to restore the remaining systems.

Microsoft said part of its infrastructure was under elevated load after a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable when they failed automated health checks. The company redirected traffic to alternate routes and tested an alternative health-check method. Microsoft later said some servers initially returned to service became unresponsive again once traffic resumed, prompting further diagnostic work and tests of additional recovery options. Microsoft told reporters it had no indication the disruption was caused by a cyberattack, according to the latest recovery report.

The outage also affected Australian public-sector organisations. Reuters reported that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australian Federal Police were among those hit on Friday. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government had activated an agreement with Microsoft to prioritise restoration of Australian services, and that Microsoft did not believe the outage was caused by a cyberattack.

The outage affected Exchange Online mailboxes and other Microsoft 365 services. Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems at the peak, although the figure reflects user reports rather than a confirmed count of affected customers. The disruption also affected connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic, with both companies reporting problems with their Microsoft 365 integrations, according to Reuters.

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Microsoft’s public service-health page tracks the disruption under incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821.


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