Microsoft 365 Outage in North America Cuts Off Email and Teams Access

Users across North America and the wider Americas ran into a large-scale disruption of Microsoft 365 on Thursday, 12 November. The suite is the US technology company's cloud package for business and enterprise customers, widely used for work email and collaboration. Many people could not access their accounts, including the Outlook email service.

How the situation unfolded

At around 10:40 am Eastern Time, Microsoft said on X that it was investigating problems with Microsoft Teams in North America. Shortly before 1 pm, it acknowledged issues reaching Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas.

Microsoft later said its network was under elevated load across several regions, but that the problem stemmed from servers going offline rather than from higher traffic. The company began redistributing connection traffic across its wider global infrastructure, paused all deployments and restarted affected servers.

SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR may also be affected. After 3 pm, the company said a problem was causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable.

Cause still unknown

Downdetector, a site that tracks service availability, showed a sharp rise in user reports around noon, with numbers starting to fall around 1:15 pm. It remains unclear when the outage will end or what caused it. There is currently no indication of a cyberattack.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was investigating reports, mainly concerning Exchange Online, and thanked customers for their patience.

Wired notes that major Microsoft outages are relatively rare but not unprecedented. In July 2024, a corrupted update from security firm Crowdstrike knocked out Microsoft Azure services for hours.