Microsoft Outlook and Teams outage continues with tens of thousands affected

A Microsoft outage has left workers stranded in several parts of the world, including India. People are experiencing problems with Outlook and Teams. “We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company posted on X Thursday afternoon. Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reporting the problem on Thursday afternoon (November 12), which went down to roughly 31,000 by 8 pm ET.

Is the Microsoft outage linked to a cyberattack or server error?

Microsoft said it has found no evidence of a cyberattack and that the problem stemmed from a large number of servers unexpectedly going offline. This led to an elevated load across the remaining infrastructure. In later updates, Microsoft said failed server health checks appeared to originate from a specific internal component responsible for processing server health.

Microsoft briefed government officials about the outage, who said that there is no indication of a cyber event. It has also not found any recent software deployment or configuration change around the time the incident started. It has paused all deployments as a precaution for now.

Meanwhile, Australia's Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke also confirmed that Microsoft officials in the country told him that they "do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event".

Microsoft fixes are not working

Microsoft has said that it will take some time to restore all services since it has noticed that the servers that have been returned to service became unresponsive again once traffic started returning to them. Its latest update says the changes to fix the outage are "not taking as expected". Microsoft is now testing other ways to fix the issue and see if more users could get on the platforms without overloading its systems.

“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” Microsoft said.

Microsoft has said in its latest update that the machines are stuck in a bad state because of which changes from syncing are not happening as expected. "Current actions we are taking include scaling up virtual machines to increase capacity and reduce load. Additionally, we’re querying for machines in a bad state to perform a force sync for our recent network change, which may improve service availability," it said.

Which services are affected by Microsoft outage?

Down Detector, the platform where people report issues with services, people were experiencing problems across different applications. Nearly 130,000 reports had been filed about problems accessing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive.

OpenAI and Anthropic also affected by Microsoft outage

Even other platforms using Microsoft are impacted, including artificial intelligence services. OpenAI is investigating an issue linked to Microsoft's services as some tools are not working as expected. Anthropic has identified an issue affecting its links to Microsoft 365 services.

https://www.wionews.com/videos/microsoft-365-outage-leaves-users-struggling-to-connect-1794538743580

Institutions using cloud-based services have been impacted, including schools and government offices. Australia’s federal police and security services, and certain businesses, were also facing the brunt of the outage. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said in a statement on its website, “Due to the global Microsoft outage, all urgent sanctions enquiries should be directed to the Australian Sanctions Office by telephone.”

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) said that some hospitals and health clinics were impacted in terms of clerical work. However, the Microsoft outage had not affected patient care. "We’ve had some facilities return to using paper for scripts because authentication to get into lots of prescribing software requires multifactor verification, which requires you to be able to access your Microsoft-supported email," AMA president Dr Michael Bonning said.