Microsoft 365 outage impacts hundreds of thousands worldwide

Microsoft has confirmed a service disruption affecting its 365 suite of business products, with hundreds of thousands of users across 74 countries experiencing problems.

The outage, which began more than 12 hours before the report, has impacted Outlook, Copilot, Teams, 365 Education, admin functions and Defender security tools, among others. Downdetector data shows Exchange, Excel and login services as the most affected.

In Ireland, user reports spiked around 6:00 pm on 12 November, with just over 500 reports logged at the time of publication.

Microsoft said on X that a portion of its infrastructure is under elevated load after several servers became “unexpectedly unavailable”, straining the remaining systems. The company does not suspect any malicious activity and is monitoring server status across regions.

Several governments and organisations have reported issues, including New Zealand’s foreign ministry, Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police, and offices in the United States and Japan. OpenAI also indicated it was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors.

Source: Silicon Republic. Photo: panumas nikhomkhai / Pexels.