Microsoft said it had fixed 98 percent of environments by noon on Monday after thousands of users reported Microsoft 365 outages earlier that morning. Multiple services and features were affected, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint Online.
However, it remains unclear when all programs will be fully restored.
The outage began after midnight U.S. Eastern Time and has impacted users worldwide.
The majority of reported problems were with Outlook, while others experienced issues with server connections and login functionality.
“Our fix has reached approximately 98 percent of the affected environments and our targeted restarts required for mitigation are being performed as quickly as possible. Additional details can be found in the admin center under MO941162.” the company said on X.
Microsoft acknowledged the outage and stated the company is “investigating the issue.”
“While we continue to work on mitigating the issue, we’ve added a comprehensive list of impacted services and scenarios to the more info section,” Microsoft added.
As of 3:30 a.m. ET on Monday, more than 5,200 users had reported issues with Microsoft 365 on the website Down Detector. Users also experienced problems connecting to other services such as OneDrive, Purview, Copilot, and Outlook Web and Desktop. Reports indicated that 86 percent of issues were with Outlook, 9 percent with Exchange, and 6 percent with SharePoint.
The company revealed that a “recent change” likely caused the outage and confirmed that the change had been reverted.
While Microsoft did not specify the nature of the change, the outage coincided with the rollout of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders. This feature, designed to take regular snapshots of computer activity—essentially a “photographic memory” for computers—allows users to store and search for information later without remembering exact keywords or dates.
Initially launched in May, the tool faced criticism for privacy and security concerns, delaying its full release until now.
Microsoft Office’s service health and the Microsoft 365 network health status pages currently show no issues with the company’s network health status and availability, internet service provider availability, and the customer’s network infrastructure.
The outage affected users across the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as in France, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, according to social media reports.
One Canadian user said, “Microsoft 365 causing all sorts of problems this morning. It’s taking on average 5 minutes to send an email. That’s worse than dial up!”
Another user from Finland said, “A global service disruption was detected with Microsoft 365 cloud services on 25 November from 4:54 AM onward @helsinkiuni. The disruption affects e.g. Outlook on the web and Teams. Microsoft is currently resolving the issue. #helsinkiuni”
Outlook and Teams, both part of the Microsoft 365 family, are widely used by millions of companies globally. Microsoft Teams is a collaborative platform for chatting, scheduling, and video calls between employees.
This is not the first major outage for Microsoft 365 this year.
In July, another global disruption affected multiple services, including the admin center, Intune, Entra, Power BI, and Power Platform. The following day, Microsoft confirmed that the nine-hour outage had been caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.