A worldwide Microsoft outage continues into a second day, leaving many without access to email and others reporting issues with Teams and other products.
"Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases," Microsoft stated in a post on X on Friday, Nov. 13, at 5:28 a.m. ET.
Microsoft stated that while it is seeing improvement, its "capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline."
At 6:11 a.m., Microsoft said "we’ve made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored."
A man looks at his phone as he passes by the Microsoft stand at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, March 3, 2025.
The company added, "We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue."
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On its website, Microsoft said that Microsoft 365 services like OneDrive, Teams, Outlook and Copilot are "operational," but some users may still be unable to access the services or perform certain tasks.
While Microsoft has not announced the number of users affected, Downdetector reported around 15,000 Microsoft Outlook problems on Friday, Nov. 13, about 6 a.m. ET.
When did the Microsoft outage begin?
The outage began on Thursday afternoon, Nov. 12. Downdetector reports peaked at 130,000 for Outlook, Microsoft's email service, at around 1 p.m. ET, while Microsoft 365 reports exceeded 47,000. Reports were logged from 74 countries and territories, Downdetector said in a post on X.
The number of workers and users affected, while not announced by Microsoft, went well beyond those tens of thousands who reported outages.
USA Today has reached out to Microsoft.
The technology giant said that the changes it made to "improve serviceability" had not taken "as expected" in a status update published shortly after 10:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, Nov. 12.
"We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," the update read.
The outage has become a cultural touchstone, with brands commenting on it and workers describing it as a "snow day." While many workers are rejoicing at being unable to access email, others say it's affecting important services and business.
This story is developing and will be updated as more information is released.
Contributing: Mary Walrath-Holdridge, Fernando Ceravantes, Thao Nguyen, Mike Snider, USA Today
