Friday morning began with a familiar ritual for millions of office workers: open the laptop, click Outlook, wait for the inbox to load. Only this time, the inbox never came. Microsoft’s email service went down across the world on Friday, 13 November, dragging Teams, Copilot and several other Microsoft 365 apps with it, and India felt the disruption within hours of it starting.
By 6:55 am IST, Indian users had already logged hundreds of complaints on outage tracker Downdetector, with Outlook accounting for the biggest share. Globally, the numbers were far larger. Nearly 1,30,000 users reported problems with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time in the United States on Thursday, and the disruption spread to 74 countries and territories within an hour.
Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack. Instead, its engineers traced it to servers that stopped working unexpectedly, which pushed extra load onto the systems still running. The company is still working to bring everything back, and as of late Friday morning in India, it had not given a time for full restoration.
What happened on Thursday night
The trouble began on Thursday afternoon in the United States. Microsoft first received reports of Exchange Online mailbox connectivity problems in the Americas, and the issue quickly spread. Outlook was the worst hit, with users unable to open mailboxes on the web, the desktop app and mobile connections.
Microsoft’s own status page, under incident ID MO1550821, warned that customers might be unable to connect to several Microsoft 365 services, particularly those that interact with Exchange Online and email. The Microsoft 365 Admin Center was affected too, which meant administrators could not even load the pages they use to check service health.
The disruption did not stay confined to email. Users also reported problems with Teams, the Copilot AI assistant, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Microsoft Store. In India, the first wave of complaints arrived early on Friday morning, as people logged in for work and found their inboxes frozen.
How bad is it in India
Downdetector data reported in India showed Outlook drawing the largest share of complaints, with more than 800 reports in the early hours of Friday. Microsoft 365 itself recorded over 200 reports, while Teams saw dozens more. The numbers kept climbing through the morning as more offices opened.
For many Indian workplaces, Outlook is not just an email app. It carries calendars, meeting links, shared files and the login flow for Teams calls. When it stops, the working day stalls with it. Social media filled up through Friday morning with users asking whether the problem was their own internet connection, only to learn it was Microsoft’s servers.
The scale is what makes this outage stand out. A single app going down is common enough. A failure that touches email, chat, documents and AI assistance at once, across 74 countries, is far rarer, and it is why the outage became one of the most talked about tech stories of the day.
What caused the outage
Microsoft has pointed to a chain of failures inside its own infrastructure rather than any outside attack. In its updates, the company said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.
Further investigation found that the extra load was not caused by a sudden surge in users. Several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, forcing the remaining systems to absorb their traffic. That created a cascading overload. Engineers also found that a process on the affected servers, responsible for establishing secure connections, was becoming overwhelmed and causing some servers to stop processing requests.
A recent network configuration change coincided with the start of the disruption, and Microsoft has begun reverting that change while it checks whether doing so helps restore normal operations. The company has stressed that this was an internal failure, not a security breach.
What Microsoft is doing to fix it
Microsoft said it has paused all deployments, is moving traffic away from the affected infrastructure and is restarting servers to return them to service. In its latest updates, the company reported early signs of recovery after some affected servers were brought back online and remained stable.
But the fix has not gone smoothly. In an update posted on X, Microsoft said it had monitored the changes applied to improve service and confirmed they were not taking effect as expected. The company said it was identifying alternate workstreams that could be applied to increase capacity, without saying when service would be fully restored.
Engineers are also testing configuration changes, restricting certain types of traffic in selected locations and gradually reintroducing traffic once servers prove stable. As of Friday late morning in India, the outage had already lasted more than seven hours, and Microsoft had not announced a confirmed end to the incident.
What users can do meanwhile
- Check before you troubleshoot: if Outlook, Teams and Copilot are all failing together, the problem is almost certainly at Microsoft’s end, not your device or Wi-Fi.
- Use the web version as a backup: some users have found Outlook on the web or the mobile app responding intermittently even when the desktop app does not.
- Keep a second channel ready: for urgent messages, switch to phone calls, SMS or another messaging app until email is back.
- Do not keep re-entering your password: repeated sign-in attempts during an outage rarely help and can lock an account.
- Watch Microsoft’s status page: the company is posting updates on X and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center as the recovery progresses.
Outages of this size are a reminder of how much everyday work now runs through a handful of cloud services. When one of them stumbles, the effect is felt in offices, schools and homes at the same time. For now, the wait continues, and Microsoft’s next update will be the one users across India are watching for.
FAQs
Is Outlook down today?
Yes. Outlook and several Microsoft 365 services went down globally on Thursday, 12 November, US time, and the disruption continued into Friday, 13 November, in India.
Which services are affected?
Outlook and Exchange Online are the worst hit. Teams, Copilot, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Microsoft Store have also reported problems.
Was this a cyberattack?
No. Microsoft has said the outage was caused by unexpected server failures and elevated load on its infrastructure, not by any malicious attack.
How many users were affected in India?
Downdetector logged more than 800 Outlook complaints in India by 6:55 am IST on Friday, with hundreds more across Microsoft 365 and Teams. Globally, nearly 1,30,000 Outlook reports were logged in the first hours.
When will Outlook be fully back?
Microsoft has not given a timeline. It says some servers are back online and stable, but its first round of fixes did not work as expected, so engineers are trying alternate measures.
Microsoft is expected to post further updates through the day. We will update this story as the recovery progresses.
