Microsoft is working to resolve a large-scale outage in its cloud services, which has affected tens of thousands of users worldwide. Connection problems were recorded in the operation of Microsoft 365 (primarily Exchange Online), Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and the AI assistant Copilot.
As BBC and CNBC report, the outages began on Thursday, November 12. At the peak of the failure, the service
Microsoft clarified that the failure occurred due to the "unexpected unavailability" of some servers that were not undergoing automated health checks. This created a critical load on the rest of the infrastructure. Because of the incident, users in the US, Japan, Singapore, and other regions lost access to certain files and calendar details, and the Copilot AI platform was not working correctly. At the same time, messaging and video calls mostly remained available.
"We have tested an alternative method of checking the functionality of services, thanks to which some servers started working again. We are now applying this change on a wider scale, and are also preparing automated recovery systems to continuously detect and restart servers that are not responding," Microsoft 365 Status said in an account on the social network X.
Against the backdrop of problems with Microsoft services, complaints about the operation of Amazon Web Services and Google also appeared on the Downdetector website. However, Amazon denied having its own technical problems, stating that their services are "operating as usual," and that a failure in other parts of the network simply "causes some inaccurate news reports to appear."
Problems in Microsoft's infrastructure also affected the operation of leading AI companies, in particular OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI said it is investigating a connectivity failure with Microsoft services, due to which some of its tools are functioning with disruptions.