Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and several other Microsoft services experienced widespread disruptions on Thursday, affecting thousands of users and disrupting connectors used by artificial intelligence platforms OpenAI and Anthropic.
The outage continued for more than five hours as Microsoft worked to restore affected servers. By 6pm Eastern Time, the company had reported limited recovery, with users gradually regaining access to services.
According to Downdetector, reports of Outlook problems peaked at approximately 138,058 around 1pm ET before falling to about 34,490 by the evening.
Microsoft said several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable under elevated demand, rather than because of 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.
Microsoft Works to Restore Affected Servers
By 5:47pm ET, reports of Microsoft 365 problems had dropped to nearly 13,000, while Downdetector recorded 763 reports involving Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft said restored servers had remained stable and that it was redirecting traffic through alternative routes wherever possible.
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The company was also working to simplify the process of bringing the remaining affected servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a statement.
OpenAI and Anthropic Report Connector Issues
The disruption also affected services connected to Microsoft’s productivity platform.
OpenAI said it was investigating problems with Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections might fail and certain tools might not work as expected.
Anthropic also confirmed an issue involving an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The disruptions highlighted how widespread reliance on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure can affect businesses and other technology platforms when major services experience technical problems.
Microsoft Outage Affects Businesses
The latest incident follows another Microsoft Azure outage in the previous month, which disrupted the company’s productivity services and affected several industries worldwide.
Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group also postponed the announcement of its third-quarter financial results from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.
