Microsoft 365 outage: Exchange Online, Teams and SharePoint among services hit

What Microsoft says

Microsoft is posting updates on its public service health page, status.cloud.microsoft, which anyone can read without signing in. Its summary of the impact is one line:

Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft service health status

On scope, Microsoft says the issue “may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.” The update doesn’t give a cause, a start time or a list of affected regions, so we don’t either.

Which services are affected

Microsoft lists these as potentially impacted. Names are as Microsoft writes them.

Where the fix stands

In its latest update, Microsoft says the servers it has returned to service “initially remain healthy”, but “they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic.” It is analysing diagnostic data from those servers with its networking and platform experts to work out what triggers this. Two things are under way:

• Limiting traffic. On top of the protective traffic management already in place, Microsoft is temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. That should show whether a particular type of request is contributing, and let it restore service step by step.
• Rolling back a configuration. Microsoft is rebuilding a subset of affected servers with a previous software configuration to check whether that stops them becoming unresponsive. If it works, it will extend that to more servers.

The update before that said Microsoft had begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, had shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways where possible, and had seen “limited recovery in some regions”. It also warned that “users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.”

Microsoft’s next update was due by 01:30 UTC on 13 November (8:30 pm Eastern on 12 November).

What you can do now

• Go by Microsoft’s own page. status.cloud.microsoft is public. Administrators can also check Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center, if it loads.
• Don’t try to fix it on your side. The problem is in Microsoft’s service. Resetting passwords, reinstalling Office or clearing caches won’t bring it back, and can leave you with more to undo afterwards. Microsoft expects clients to recover as they reconnect, so leaving Outlook and Teams open is fine.
• Use what’s already on your device. Mail that Outlook for desktop has already downloaded, and files already synced to your computer, normally stay readable while the service is down.
• Switch urgent conversations to another channel. Phone, text or another chat tool for anything that can’t wait. If your business email is affected, tell customers on your website or social accounts.
• Be wary of “re-verify your account” messages. An outage is a handy story for phishing. Don’t sign in through links in emails or texts that claim to restore your access. Go to Microsoft’s pages directly.

Following it on UtiBox

Our Microsoft 365 status page carries this alert while the incident is open, with a link to Microsoft’s status page. One thing to know: our own check loads microsoft365.com from our server. That page can answer normally while signed-in services such as Exchange Online and Teams are failing, so for this incident go by Microsoft’s notices rather than our green dot.

To get an email when a major outage is confirmed, and again when it’s over, subscribe to the Outage Digest.

Microsoft 365 status on UtiBox

Sources

• Microsoft service health status (status.cloud.microsoft) (opens in a new tab)
• Microsoft Admin Center Status RSS feed (Microsoft 365) (opens in a new tab)