Microsoft sees gradual recovery after 20-hour outage, extends email timeout to 48 hours

Update: In its latest X post, Microsoft has confirmed that it is seeing recovery across regions with users receiving emails on Outlook. “We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific,” the company wrote. “Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure.” Microsoft added that it was closely monitoring affected infrastructure.

Microsoft says it is gradually restoring services affected by the ongoing Microsoft 365 outage, but users may continue to experience problems as the company works through pending emails and service backlogs. In its latest update, Microsoft said recovery efforts were progressing in phases across the affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. While some workloads are showing improvement, the company cautioned that service availability remains inconsistent and its systems have not yet returned to normal capacity.

The company has also extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to prevent delayed messages from being lost while it processes the accumulated email queue. This means users may have to wait longer than usual for pending emails to be delivered, even as other services begin recovering.

The disruption began on Thursday, November 12, and affected several Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 services. Users reported trouble accessing their inboxes, sending and receiving emails, viewing files and checking calendar information.

Downdetector recorded nearly 140,000 reports of Outlook problems from 74 countries on Thursday evening. Microsoft 365 has more than 430 million users worldwide, giving the outage the potential to disrupt businesses and public services across regions.

The impact has also extended to other technology companies. OpenAI reported problems with its connections to Microsoft's services, which affected the functioning of some of its tools. AI company Anthropic also reported disruption.

Government organisations have faced problems too. The Singapore government and Australia's intelligence agency were among those reporting an impact. In the UK, several GP practices warned patients that they could face difficulties contacting them through email or online forms, asking people with urgent queries to call instead.

Microsoft rules out cyberattack as cause

Microsoft has attributed the disruption to elevated load on parts of its infrastructure. The company said several servers became unexpectedly unavailable, pushing additional traffic to the remaining servers and putting them under further pressure.

The company has said it does not believe the incident was caused by a cyberattack. Its earlier recovery attempts also faced difficulties, with some servers becoming unresponsive again after traffic was redirected to them.

Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt told the BBC that the incident showed how dependent everyday services have become on email and Microsoft's infrastructure. He warned that the disruption could affect everything from workplace communication and appointments to online purchases and account verification.

Microsoft is continuing its recovery efforts, but it has not yet provided a confirmed timeline for a complete restoration of services.