Major outage hits Microsoft Outlook; Singapore users affected - The Straits Times
Microsoft said it had “confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”.
Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Nov 12, with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services.
As of 6pm ET (7am on Nov 13, Singapore time), Microsoft said it was still working to return affected servers to service, and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected.
Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1pm ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector.
In Singapore, the outage tracker began recording reports at about 2am overnight, with numbers continuing to climb on the morning of Nov 13.
As at about 8.10am, there were 683 outage reports for Microsoft Outlook, and 357 reports for Microsoft 365. There were also 40 outage reports for Microsoft Teams, and 20 reports for Microsoft Copilot.
The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable for the elevated load and not 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.
By 5.47pm ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 user, while there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector.
The tech giant had then said the restored servers had remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a statement.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft in October reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant’s suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on Nov 12, rescheduled it to Nov 16 citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage. REUTERS
