If your Outlook inbox isn’t loading or your workplace Microsoft tools are struggling, a wider service outage could be the reason.
Microsoft’s disruption began on Thursday, 12 November, and continued into Friday across several regions. Outlook, Teams and parts of Microsoft 365 have been affected, although the problems have not been identical for every user.
Microsoft’s public dashboard still showed service degradation when checked, with an update timestamp of 12:42pm South African time on Friday, 13 November.
Email services are at the centre of the outage
Microsoft says the disruption affects Exchange Online and features in other services that depend on its email systems. Functions that do not rely on Exchange Online have remained operational.
Users have reported difficulty accessing mailboxes and sending or receiving messages. Problems have also been reported with Teams and Copilot, while affected organizations have had to find other ways to communicate.
Microsoft identifies overloaded servers
The company said a process that establishes secure connections became overwhelmed on affected servers. Engineers have been restarting infrastructure and changing how traffic reaches it.
Microsoft reported better stability after applying a patch on Friday morning, but earlier fixes had failed to produce a lasting recovery. The company has said there is no indication of a cyberattack.
Where to check for updates
For anyone relying on Outlook or Teams for work or studying:
- Check Microsoft’s service-status page for updates.