Microsoft outage hits Teams, Outlook and Copilot for over 20 hours, now recovering

What happened

Microsoft services began failing on the afternoon of Thursday, 12 November, when users reported problems accessing Microsoft Teams. The problems then spread to Exchange Online mailboxes and went on to affect Microsoft 365, Copilot, SharePoint and Defender XDR. Sources differ on the length of the disruption, with several outlets reporting more than 20 hours and LaSexta reporting more than 15 hours.

Reported reach also varies: RTVE said millions of users in up to 74 countries were affected, while El Periodico put the number of countries at more than 70. By Friday, 13 November, Microsoft said recovery was continuing, with broader improvements in North America, sustained gains across much of Europe and encouraging signs in Asia Pacific. The company warned that some users could still see intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery while mitigation continued on remaining infrastructure.

Microsoft's explanation

Microsoft attributed the outage to a problem that arose during an earlier network capacity update and came to light after a recent network change. In a statement shared on X, the company said the incident was not linked to cybersecurity or artificial intelligence and that the underlying problem had been resolved. Services were restored gradually given the scale of demand, a process the company acknowledged took longer but helped ensure a stable restoration. According to the BBC, Charles Lamanna, executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platforms, said there were no indications of malicious activity. Microsoft apologised for the disruption and said a full report would follow once its review is complete.

Chatbots and Claude

OpenAI said its status page showed a problem with Microsoft connectors in which new connections could be broken, with ChatGPT marked as degraded performance. It did not say whether Codex was affected or what caused the problem. Anthropic attributed failures in its Microsoft 365 connectors to the Microsoft incident, saying they caused most mail, calendar and search requests in Claude to fail. Separately, Anthropic reported authentication problems on Claude.ai and Claude Code from Friday morning, after first reports around 10:30 on Downdetector. Anthropic acknowledged rising authentication errors at 10:58 and said at 12:05 that it had deployed a fix while monitoring recovery. El Confidencial reported that the Claude disruption had not been confirmed as directly related to the Microsoft 365 problems.

Impact on businesses and public bodies

RTVE reported that a banking employee said staff were initially unable to contact clients and colleagues by email, until they switched to other applications. An accounting manager at a Spanish protection products firm said email was essential for receiving customer orders and for communicating with the parent company in Italy. Some sales were affected because staff could not give product details through Microsoft tools. RTVE also reported that the impact on the Spanish General State Administration was smaller, because most civil servants' email is hosted in data centres.

In Europe, a Bank of England spokesperson said all critical operations were running normally, and the ECB told Europa Press that Microsoft 365, including Outlook, was gradually returning to normal. European stock exchanges operated without significant disruption. LSEG, which runs the London Stock Exchange, also pointed to a global Office 365 problem affecting some of its services.

Online reaction

El Periodico reported that thousands of users were left unable to check email, access files or join work meetings since Thursday. Brands including FNAC, Domino's Pizza and KitKat responded on social media with jokes and memes about the outage.