Punjab Newsline | Washington
Millions of Microsoft users worldwide faced difficulties on Friday as a major outage disrupted several services under the company's Microsoft 365 platform, including Outlook, Microsoft Copilot and other productivity tools. Acknowledging the issue, Microsoft said that the changes implemented to resolve the disruption were not producing the expected results.
Microsoft Services Down for Several Hours
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, users began reporting problems with Microsoft 365 around 12:30 pm on November 12. Initially, complaints were reported from a few countries, but the number of affected users increased significantly by the evening.
By Thursday evening, more than 130,000 users had reported problems accessing services such as Outlook, Teams, Copilot, Exchange Online and SharePoint.
According to Downdetector, the outage had spread to more than 74 countries by November 13.
Microsoft said the disruption was affecting users' ability to connect to several Microsoft 365 services, particularly Exchange Online and email-related facilities.
Users reported difficulties accessing their mailboxes through Outlook Web, the desktop application and other connections. Delays in sending and receiving emails were also reported.
Other issues included problems loading the Microsoft 365 admin centre and the inability to view recently accessed files within certain applications.
Microsoft Copilot Also Affected
The outage also affected Microsoft 365 Copilot, with some users experiencing difficulties loading Copilot Chat and receiving responses.
Additionally, Copilot was reportedly unable to access work-related data, including emails, calendars and files.
Microsoft said that most core Microsoft Teams features continued to function normally, including making calls, joining meetings, group chats and channel messaging.
However, some calendar-related features, the creation of live and virtual events, Copilot responses and contact synchronisation were also affected.
Several Other Microsoft Services Hit
Apart from Outlook, Teams and Copilot, the disruption also impacted several other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Defender, Fabric, Graph, Intune, Planner, Purview, To Do, Power BI, SharePoint Online, Universal Print and Windows 365.
In an update on social media platform X, Microsoft said it had implemented certain changes to improve service performance. However, monitoring revealed that these changes were not having the desired impact.
The company is continuing to investigate the issue and work towards restoring normal services.
