Microsoft’s massive Outlook outage continues

Service is gradually starting to recover for Microsoft Outlook and 365 after an almost two-day outage impacting millions of users around the world. While some apps and features are still running in a degraded state, some people (including Verge staffers) are reporting that access to their emails has been restored, though the flow of Outlook mail might be delayed while efforts to fully fix the outage continue.

Charles Lamanna, Copilot, agents, and platform leader at Microsoft said in a statement to The Verge that the situation is continuing to improve:

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”

Senior Verge correspondent Tom Warren reports that according to his sources, the outage is linked to Azure VNet config changes. Microsoft has said that it hasn’t found any evidence of the outage being connected to “malicious activity,” and that a full report will be shared after the issues are mitigated. In a statement reported by Sky News tech correspondent Rowland Manthorpe, Microsoft described the outage as a “technical issue,” and says it isn’t related to “cyber, AI/agents, DDOS, etc.”

The scope of the outage also affects features in other Microsoft services, including SharePoint Online, Teams, Copilot AI, and 365 apps. In a status update posted just before 10AM ET, Microsoft said that “some users may still experience intermittent connectivity issues or delayed email delivery” while restoration efforts are underway.

Update, November 13th, 11:16AM ET: Added the latest information from Microsoft.