Microsoft Outage Hits Copilot AI as Outlook and Teams Problems Spread Worldwide
Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot AI worldwide as recovery efforts face setbacks. Find out what happened and why AI tools were affected.
Microsoft has been battling a major global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and its Copilot AI assistant, with attempts to restore services failing to work as expected.
The disruption began on Thursday 12 November and continued into Friday, leaving businesses and individuals struggling to access emails, workplace applications and AI-powered tools.
Almost 130,000 reports of Outlook problems were recorded in the United States at the height of the disruption, although that figure represents reported incidents rather than the total number of people affected. Problems were also reported across dozens of countries, including disruption to Microsoft 365 services used by businesses and government organisations.
Why Has the Outage Affected AI?
Microsoft Copilot uses artificial intelligence to help people write emails, summarise meetings, analyse documents and access workplace information. During the outage, some users were unable to load Copilot Chat or retrieve information from connected emails, calendars and files.
The problems extended beyond Microsoft’s own AI assistant, with Microsoft 365 connections used by OpenAI and Anthropic also affected. This demonstrates how AI services can experience disruption even when their underlying language models are functioning, because they rely on other systems to retrieve information.
What Has Microsoft Said?
Microsoft has identified problems involving servers handling secure connections and has been investigating network configuration and traffic-management issues. The company acknowledged that some recovery measures were not working as expected and said it was exploring alternative ways to restore capacity.
There is no confirmed evidence that artificial intelligence caused the outage, and Microsoft has indicated that it has no evidence of a cyberattack.
The incident highlights how closely connected everyday workplace software and AI services have become, with disruption to cloud infrastructure capable of affecting both.
