Microsoft outage: Outlook, Teams and Office down for 11 hours
Outlook, Teams and Office stopped working for hundreds of thousands of people for more than 11 hours. Users asked about a cyberattack, but nothing confirms one.
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giftdetect· the right gift in minutesA Microsoft outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and Office for more than 11 hours, leaving hundreds of thousands of people around the world without email, meetings or their usual work tools.
Reports began to appear on the evening of Thursday, 12 November, at about 8:30 pm Egypt time. Downdetector, a site that tracks outages of online services, logged close to 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook at the peak. The number of new reports later fell to around 10,000. Similar complaints came in about Office and Teams.
Was the Microsoft outage a cyberattack?
The length of the disruption set off speculation among users that Microsoft had been hacked. That is understandable: millions of people and organisations rely on these services every day.
But the information available does not confirm any breach or attack, so a cyberattack cannot be treated as the cause. The real explanation is still waiting on an official technical statement from Microsoft.
Who was affected?
It was not only individual users. Businesses, government bodies, schools and healthcare providers all use Microsoft apps to run their work, send messages and schedule meetings, and they were hit too.
Large companies were affected as well, among them the Indian airlines Air India and IndiGo, and the AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
The episode is a reminder of how much of the working world sits on one company's cloud and office tools. When email and meetings vanish together, there is not much left to fall back on, which is why backup options and emergency plans matter for any organisation that depends on them.
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