On a Friday morning in mid-November, people across London and far beyond found their email and work chats still unreachable, a disruption that had begun the evening before and had resisted every repair Microsoft attempted overnight. It is the kind of quiet dependence modern life has built up around a few shared systems, where a single failure can stop offices, families and inboxes at once. Microsoft has said, for now, that nothing malicious appears to be behind it, but it has not yet explained what went wrong or when normal service will return.
Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot as fixes fail to take hold across London and beyond
Fixes that did not take, and an update page that would not load
Mark
Let's start simple. What actually broke, and for how long?
Mimi
Teams, Outlook, Hotmail, Copilot and parts of Microsoft's cloud services. UK reports spiked around 6.15pm Thursday and were still coming in at 6am Friday.
Mark
And Microsoft tried to fix it overnight?
Mimi
Several times. It got servers running more than once, but they crashed again. It also isolated parts of its infrastructure and rerouted traffic, and said the changes weren't taking as expected.
Luke
Careful with the timeline, though. Downdetector measures user reports, not the outage itself. It's a good signal of when complaints started, not proof of exactly when the fault began.
Mark
Fair. What about the cyber-attack question?
Mimi
Charles Lamanna said on X there's no indication of malicious or cyber activity. That matters because it rules out the scariest explanation, at least for now.
Luke
Note the wording: no indication. That's a current reading, not a conclusion. Nothing in the reporting gives a cause, and no one has said when it'll be resolved.
Mark
What about OpenAI being affected?
Mimi
It reported issues too. The source doesn't say how that connects to Microsoft's problems.
Luke
Right, so we shouldn't imply a link. Two companies reporting trouble at once is a fact; the reason is unknown.
Mark
Anything telling about how Microsoft handled it?
Mimi
Its update page wouldn't load for some users, so it fell back on its Microsoft 365 social accounts. People trying to find out what was wrong ran into the same fault.
Der Puls
- Teams, Outlook, Hotmail and Copilot went dark for UK users around 6.15pm on Thursday, and by Friday morning the trouble had not eased.
- Servers restored overnight crashed again, leaving engineers chasing a fix that kept slipping away.
- Rerouting traffic and isolating parts of the infrastructure were tried, but Microsoft admits the changes are not taking effect as hoped.
- Users were left locked out of updates when Microsoft's own status page would not load, so information came only through official social accounts.
- Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyber-attack, yet no root cause or return time has been named.
On a Friday morning in mid-November, people across London and far beyond found their email and work chats still unreachable, a disruption that had begun the evening before and had resisted every repair Microsoft attempted overnight. It is the kind of quiet dependence modern life has built up around a few shared systems, where a single failure can stop offices, families and inboxes at once. Microsoft has said, for now, that nothing malicious appears to be behind it, but it has not yet explained what went wrong or when normal service will return.
By six on Friday morning, people across London and well beyond were still staring at error messages where their Outlook inboxes and Teams chats should have been. The trouble had begun the previous evening, when reports of problems with Microsoft Teams started climbing around 6.15pm on Thursday. By dawn, the disruption had spread to Hotmail, Copilot and parts of Microsoft's cloud services, and Microsoft had not yet made its repairs hold.
The company described a night of repeated effort. Servers were brought back up several times, only to crash again, and attempts to isolate parts of the infrastructure and shift traffic onto other routes did not deliver a lasting fix. In its update, Microsoft admitted that the changes it had applied were not taking effect as expected.
Even getting word out proved difficult. The status page users were directed to would not load, so updates came through official Microsoft 365 accounts instead. Charles Lamanna, an executive vice president, said on X that the company regretted the disruption and that there was no indication the outage was caused by malicious or cyber activity, though that assessment reflected what the company could see so far rather than a final finding.
For now, the questions remain open: when Teams, Outlook, Hotmail and Copilot will return, and what Microsoft eventually says went wrong.
By six on Friday morning, people across London and well beyond were still staring at error messages where their Outlook inboxes and Teams chats should have been. The trouble had started the previous evening, and by dawn Microsoft had not managed to make its repairs stick.
Monitoring website Downdetector first recorded a spike in UK users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams at around 6.15pm on Thursday. Issues were still being reported at 6am on Friday, roughly twelve hours later. Teams and Outlook were joined by Hotmail email, the AI service Copilot and some aspects of Microsoft's cloud services. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues.
Microsoft described a night of repeated effort. In an update on Friday, it said it had managed several times, overnight UK time, to get its servers running again, and that those servers had then crashed. It had also tried isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic onto alternate routes. Neither approach delivered a lasting fix. "We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected," the company said.
Communication was itself a problem. Microsoft had at first directed people to a page on its website for updates, but users complained that the page would not load. The company then relied on its official Microsoft 365 accounts for regular updates. To organisations affected, it offered a message of thanks: "We appreciate your organisation's patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident."
One question was answered early. Charles Lamanna, an executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote on X that the company regretted the disruption to customers and was working to address it. He said more information would follow as soon as it was available, and that for now he could confirm there was no indication the outage was the result of malicious or cyber activity.
That statement carries a qualifier worth noting: it describes what the company can see at this stage, not a final finding. Microsoft has not, in the account available, named a root cause for the failure or said when full service would return.
What can be said is this. A problem that began on Thursday evening had, by Friday morning, survived several attempts at repair, including restarts that failed and rerouting that did not take. For users in the UK and elsewhere, the practical question is when Teams, Outlook, Hotmail and Copilot come back, and the broader one is what Microsoft eventually says went wrong.
Bemerkenswerte Zitate
We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected.— Microsoft
There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.— Charles Lamanna, Microsoft executive vice president, on X
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