Microsoft Outlook Goes Down Nationwide [UPDATE] (variety.com) 120
Microsoft is suffering a major Microsoft 365 outage that's disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and SharePoint for users across the Americas, with more than 129,000 problem reports logged on Downdetector shortly after the disruption began. Microsoft blames the connectivity problems on an unexpectedly large number of unavailable servers that overloaded the remaining infrastructure. The company says it's redistributing traffic and restarting affected systems. From a report: Microsoft was not providing an estimated time by which it expects service to return. Both individual Outlook users and those on enterprise accounts experienced problems logging in to the service. The outage also affected other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, the Copilot 365 AI service and SharePoint Online. "Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services," the company said on its Service Health Status page.
UPDATE 11/12/26, 19:50 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: "We're testing a configuration change to address a problem that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are monitoring health as they return to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you."
UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:19 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: "We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:29 UTC: "According to https://downdetector.com/, much of the major services are down," writes Slashdot reader xocmot2. "AWS, Microsoft, Meta, on and on. Clearly not a Microsoft thing."
UPDATE 11/12/26, 6:17 UTC: Microsoft is still struggling to resolve the outage, which is confirmed to be global with disruptions reported across 74 countries and territories. The outage has disrupted businesses and government services in countries including Japan, Singapore, India, and Australia, while OpenAI and Anthropic have also reported related problems.
Microsoft says its recovery efforts have produced some improvements, but the fixes are not delivering "sustained recovery." Microsoft has ruled out a cybersecurity incident, and experts warn that the prolonged disruption could result in significant economic losses.
Developing...
UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:19 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: "We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:29 UTC: "According to https://downdetector.com/, much of the major services are down," writes Slashdot reader xocmot2. "AWS, Microsoft, Meta, on and on. Clearly not a Microsoft thing."
UPDATE 11/12/26, 6:17 UTC: Microsoft is still struggling to resolve the outage, which is confirmed to be global with disruptions reported across 74 countries and territories. The outage has disrupted businesses and government services in countries including Japan, Singapore, India, and Australia, while OpenAI and Anthropic have also reported related problems.
Microsoft says its recovery efforts have produced some improvements, but the fixes are not delivering "sustained recovery." Microsoft has ruled out a cybersecurity incident, and experts warn that the prolonged disruption could result in significant economic losses.
Developing...
What's with the past tense? (Score:2)
This is affecting people right now
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This is a website, not a zoom meeting.
Re: What's with the past tense? (Score:2)
It's also having issues. Post counts aren't updating. Are they calculated with Outlook somehow?
Re: What's with the past tense? (Score:2)
Because the government is the only thing you won't poo on, it will probably please you to know that GCC high hasn't had any problems today.
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Yep. It's incredibly annoying.
Copilot too... (Score:2)
Copilot isn't working, either.
Re: Copilot too... (Score:3)
Every cloud...
Re:Copilot too... (Score:5, Funny)
> Copilot isn't working, either.
Well at least there's an upside to all this.
=Smidge=
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Copilot isn't working, either.
Was it going to start working some day?
Re: Copilot too... (Score:3)
Joke at my work is someone wanted to use unused memory cycles to enhance copilot and it it taking over.
The other joke was this is how skynet starts.
The fact that servers are being rebooted and still affected means they screwed up something with a cascading failure.
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This is affecting people right now
Unfortunately my work email is on Gmail, so I'm still seeing the complaints from our Outlook users while our Windows guys are not. ... and we talk on Teams, so I can't relay them that way either.
SMS it is!
Re: What's with the past tense? (Score:2)
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Following up... it appears Teams is actually functioning for us - it's just very laggy.
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This is affecting people right now
Unfortunately my work email is on Gmail, so I'm still seeing the complaints from our Outlook users while our Windows guys are not. ... and we talk on Teams, so I can't relay them that way either.
SMS it is!
Yup, forced onto Outlook, I did capture my emails and redirect them, but the cockup is now preventing me from getting anything from work. It needs to be working for me this weekend or SHTF. Guess I'll have to let everyone I know of that might need me to use an alternative and functioning email. Of course it isn't like I told them this day would come some years ago.
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This is affecting people right now
Unfortunately my work email is on Gmail, so I'm still seeing the complaints from our Outlook users while our Windows guys are not. ... and we talk on Teams, so I can't relay them that way either.
SMS it is!
That is how I am updating my users. Funny thing is Teams is working in my org.
Just checked ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just checked ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is LibreOffice a MTA now?
Re:Just checked ... (Score:5, Funny)
No, he relies on emacs for that.
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As well as psychoanalysis.
Re: Just checked ... (Score:2, Funny)
What makes you say that?
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Not, but Thunderbird works flawlessly
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Hmm. Mine is too! And my own mail server also still works.
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What about Hillary's? /j
Re:Just checked ... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, accessing it now from Hunter's laptop
Re:Just checked ... (Score:4, Insightful)
My self hosted email seems to be up too.
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The difference isn't that when your self hosted email server goes down it doesn't make the news.
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Mine, too, although I haven't received as many spam emails as I normally would receive since the outage. Makes one wonder ...
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And what has your aggregated uptime stat been? I hope you were going for a funny, because if you really thought that a point in time check is in any way relevant than you have no business being anywhere near IT infrastructure.
My self hosted email is also currently up. It was down for 2 days last month though due to cable works in our street. You probably didn't hear about it because it didn't make the Slashdot front page.
Millions of MS Office users never noticed .... (Score:2, Informative)
So are the Microsoft apps installed onto the computer. They do not require internet access, just like Libre, and unlike the web versions of office that do not require installed apps..
Millions of MS Office users never noticed any disruption.
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Oh my sweet summer child. This is absolutely not true in many cases.
Oh my colored glasses friend, its as true for local MS Office apps and local documents as it is true for local LibreOffice apps and local documents. The comparison of LibreOffice to Office360 was flawed by not considering this duality of Office360. Office360 allows one to install and use the local apps, you are not required to be web based.
Fun! (Score:2)
Any particular data centers? Sounds like a software rollout issue, where machines think they're bad when they're not, rather than flooding or power outages etc? There's usually two or three interacting parts in these things, which things? Sounds like they've identified the interaction, how fast can they get a fix out now that they know what it is?
Re: Fun! (Score:3)
Since they aren't sure, I'm betting it's an attack. When Microsoft gets attacked they are helpless. They still don't know what happened in those big azure hacks because they had no logs
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They still don't know what happened in those big azure hacks because they had no logs
Indeed. It is like the whole company has a secret death wish.
This is an inevitable/predictable consequence (Score:5, Interesting)
All of these companies -- and others -- have gutted the budgets and personnel that "keep the lights on" -- that do the routine work that keeps everything running. The money has been shifted into AI, the people have either been shifted as well or simply laid off. The remaining skeleton crews are largely composed of junior people who not only lack the required knowledge, but the kind of judgment and expertise that only comes with running things for 10, 15, 20 years. They might (or might not be) smart, diligent, and hard-working -- but they're in over their heads. And thus we see what we see here.
All of us who've been running things on this network for a very long time have seen this movie, multiple times. It always ends the same way. So my advice to those of you who are relying in any way, directly or indirectly, on Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc., is: make a plan. Now. Because you don't want any part of where this is going.
Let me add one more thing. It's unknown whether the AI bubble will burst or not. Perhaps the NVidia/Huang affair (literally) is the first sign of that, perhaps it's not. But: if it bursts, and there's a non-zero probability of that happening, then that will exacerbate this -- and those companies will need to cut costs and boost revenue. Two ways to do that are cutting operational budgets/staff even further and increasing prices. We've seen this movie too. Heck, I've been in this movie, and it was an awful experience that dragged on until we finally managed to extricate ourselves from the wreckage.
So do yourself a favor: make a plan.
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With Teams down, I've gotten more done than I have all year. It's been so great, our CTO has proposed banning Teams on Wednesdays which is our RTO day. I hope we do that.
server status (Score:3)
Current status: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service. Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services. Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 10:00 PM UTC
Sharepoint is glitchy but I can get docs, office365 apps work, email for domains is busted.
I don't trust the downdetector reports (Score:3, Interesting)
I seriously doubt so many other services are also down. I think it's more likely a bad actor is falsifying reports to downdetector.
Re:I don't trust the downdetector reports (Score:5, Insightful)
DownDetector is user reported, so Hanlon's razor [wikipedia.org] probably applies here.
In other sysadmin/operator forums/online communities, it's just Microsoft reported as having issues. And anecdotally, all those other services work for me.
Re: I don't trust the downdetector reports (Score:2)
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One explanation I heard is that some companies use Microsoft's "safe links" service to rewrite URLs. So people might click on what they think is a Slack/Facebook/whatever link, but because Microsoft's redirector is down, they report the site as down to Downdetector. Maybe that's it?
Re: I don't trust the downdetector reports (Score:2)
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I can access Facebook, Instagram and Threads with no problems. And Amazon.com is still up and running. I'm confused.
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Any status updates on your grand hypothesis?
Will the fact that it turned out to be 100% wrong spare us from you sharing your thoughts on shit you know fuckall about in the future?
No? That sucks
Obligatory (Score:2)
Obligatory "And nothing of value was lost."
Time to decrement the version number (Score:5, Funny)
It's now more accurately known as Microsoft 364.
Re: Time to decrement the version number (Score:2)
I love this! lol
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Based on my observations from outside the ecosystem... I'm not so sure it shouldn't be "Microsoft 300".
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It's now more accurately known as Microsoft 364.
If you loved Microsoft 364, you’ll be blown away by their latest offering coming this spring Microsoft 360.
Just like real weather... (Score:2)
... when so much gets saturated in the cloud, it eventually rains.
Microsoft must have called their helpline (Score:3)
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Yeah, but have they tried turning off and back on again?
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It better be a Unix system, because it's the only thing she knows.
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How many times did you turn off and back on? Yeah, always 3 times before calling, okay.
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"we've initiated a restart of all affected servers " Nice to know they do the same thing they tell others too. Have you tried rebooting it (again)?
Did they say it with an unintelligible accent?
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Exactly... I can tell them how to fix it right now, stop rebooting everything, let the working servers take up the load/em.
I mean, fuck an A... if you put too many servers into maintenance at the same time, causing the remaining servers to error on overload, that's not a "reboot and see if it works" scenario.
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Microsoft is in Redmond, which is on the west coast, as I am.
But I guarantee they hired all of the most boring programmers from the midwest that they could find.
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I'm sure it's just a coincidence that yesterday MS updated almost all of their software on my desktop PC - MS Office, Edge, Copilot, One drive. Problems with either download volume, or with the software itself (and users accessing MS servers trying to figure out what went wrong) couldn't possibly have caused the extra volume that caused their servers top go down. Nor could "running lean" have led to not enough spare capacity to handle an increased load. But that's all purely speculation on my part.
Just wait. Final analysis is gonna show that somehow the GTA preloaders are tapping something within the Microsoft ecosystem and dragging the whole topping house of cards down with them.
Breaking News (Score:2)
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Well, this is Microsoft so saying it's a Tech story is a bit misleading. It's 200[x]s tech, today!
The illusion of redundancy. (Score:2)
There's always a single point of failure. Seems like the health watchdog was failing such that it thought it was healthy and kept reporting itself so. There's a limit to how much you can mitigate.
I'm unwilling to pass judgment just yet. How quickly they recover will be the most important question.
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You can have heaps of redundant hardware but it's generally all running the same software and firmware. You don't even need an update to trigger failures; there've been plenty of cases in the past of firmware failing when some date, uptime, or similar counter reaches a limit.
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As I understood it, the health watchdog may have been falsely reporting unhealthy servers and thus removing them from production unnecessarily.
Either way, some flunky developer deployed something they shouldn't have.
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I doubt very much that this is true. Much more likely communication problems hit an unanticipated corner case.
Microsoft may have had a lot of silly mistakes in their past, but even they don't give junior devs deployment to production access, or let their artifacts go unchecked.
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The "single point of failure" here is the believe that rebooting servers solves problems.
"We took too many servers for Foo down for maintenance at the same time, now the remaining servers are returning errors."
"Reboot all the Foo servers."
"Now Bar is also overloaded."
"Reboot everything!"
How quickly everything is back online depends on how long it takes to find an adult that outranks the BOFH.
The house of cards is wobbling. (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that return to client/server working out?
Someone tripped over ... (Score:3)
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At lest those that aren't being run through by Jensen Huang....
Guess what... Word I BOUGHT in 2016 still works... (Score:2)
classic Microsoft troubleshooting (Score:2)
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They're probably doing that right now, first they had to reboot three times, call support, call support again, find the sticky note with the password on the BOFH's monitor, call support again, reboot three more times, throw a rubber chicken, reboot, and then file a request for physical boot media.
Outlook, Teams, CoPilot and SharePoint (Score:2)
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How did Microsoft run out of resources?
There's reportedly some kind of issue where many servers are deciding they're not working properly and taking themselves offline. If so, it's not a lack of hardware resources that's the issue, though it may have seemed that way initially.
Countdown 2026 (Score:5, Funny)
Shit, I lost count.
I think we are at Microsoft 363 now.
I remember when... (Score:3)
We didn't have all our eggs in one or two baskets.
So anyway. Self-host FTW.
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"We" still don't have all our eggs in somebody's basket.
Glad I'm Retired (Score:3)
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Nobody else has to worry about it either, while it's down. Break time!
Slashdot is UP! (Score:5, Funny)
Sleep with the Devil (Score:2)
No manager has ever been fired for choosing Microsoft products (1990s saying). Is it time to pound a nail in that? 40 years in IT and NEVER recommended Microsoft anything. Also didn't need any expensive indoctrination, er, training.
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Used to be IBM.
We all saw where that went.
Migrate to the cloud! (Score:2)
Cloud repatriation?? What's that man? You some kinda hippy? Worse, a socialist?!
Parting thought: Emails services are easy to setup. You can setup multi-routing. Why do you need a single point of failure if emails matter to you? Micro$oft is conditioning you to use its features so any other email clients feel wrong or inferior...but uhm we have other alternatives to serve & read email for decades.
You reading this on Focus mode?
It's night time at my employer in India (Score:2)
So this failure is wider than the USofA.
Go fix it (Score:3)
Customer call: "I know Microsoft is down, when are you going to fix it?". Sure I will just drive right down there and go fix that for you.
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Customer call: "I know Microsoft is down, when are you going to fix it?". Sure I will just drive right down there and go fix that for you.
Did that customer sign a contract with you to provide certain "currently out" services? Then don't try to blame some third party, it's you who's responsible to establish vendor independence and redundancy as necessary.
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AMEN:
It is your fault if your application is down [ufried.com]
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Though to be fair, if you're taking a customer call about it, it's not actually on you personally.
They should probably foist them off on their sales engineer to figure out who to call.
Single-Points-of-Failure (Score:2)
Mike, did you get my email about email being down? (Score:3)
Mike?
Couldn't have happened to a better set of people (Score:2)
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Up the Down Detector :o (Score:2)
PowerApps too (Score:2)
My workplace uses PowerApps modules woven into Microsoft Dynamics 365. All the PowerApps failed for a few hours. This means we couldn't add orders, dispatch technicians, or send messages into our core integrated platforms that we use to communicate with our customers.
Remember the late nineties when distributed computing was all the rage and Microsoft bought it all out to make sure everything was centralized.
Guess what, when a centralized monolithic monoculture fails, damn near everything fails at once. I'm
Health Checks? (Score:2)
Let me guess ... some twit put an AI something into the system startup sequence and before the system starts handling real loads the agent needs to bless it and allow it into the pool.
After 1000 patches were applied, the AI saw 9000 things it had never seen before and panic.
Because nobody ever thought about the failure scenarios and whether 9000 new things happening could actually be an ok thing ... and it immediately responded instead with system protection SOAR type response.
Over/under... (Score:2)
B. AI nonsense
Re:Agent Orange (Score:5, Funny)
i have the biggest outages, bigger than anyones seen before
sysadmin came to be, big man, beautiful ass, beatiful big muscles, he came to me, tears in his eyes and said "sir, ive never seen outages like this before". true story, good friend of mine.