Microsoft Global Outage Drags Into Second Day Affecting Millions on Outlook, Teams and Copilot

A massive Microsoft outage spanning more than a dozen cloud services, including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, stretched into a second consecutive day on Friday, November 13, disrupting work for tens of millions of users across companies, governments, and schools worldwide. Microsoft attributed the incident to a network capacity upgrade, ruled out malicious activity, and called it a "historic" outage. Recovery efforts hit repeated snags, with Cointelegraph reporting Friday evening that fixes were not going as expected before Microsoft later said it was seeing "broad recovery and stability" across services.

The disruption forced businesses to fall back on faxes, phones, and Bluetooth connections to maintain basic operations, while the UK's National Health Service rescheduled medical procedures after its systems were affected. Down Detector recorded a peak of 48,124 U.S. user reports at 1:21 p.m. ET on November 12. Services used by other technology companies that rely on Microsoft infrastructure, including Anthropic and OpenAI, were also impacted.

Microsoft apologized for the outage, which had disrupted access to email, Teams messaging, and Microsoft 365 tools throughout the two-day episode. Charles Lamanna, the company's Executive Vice President for Copilot, Agents and Platform, addressed the incident publicly. The event renewed scrutiny of corporate over-reliance on single cloud providers and the fragility of interconnected technology infrastructure.