Microsoft 365 has been partly broken for over 17 hours. The company now reports that inboxes are opening again and stuck messages are being delivered. Traffic is being sent back to repaired servers a little at a time, so some people will still hit intermittent errors.
If your office or university runs on Outlook and Teams, the practical advice is to expect a patchy day: mail that was stuck may arrive late, and a service that works now can drop again while capacity is added.
Microsoft’s status account first flagged the problem at 17:54 UTC on 12 November, saying it was investigating trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes “through multiple connection methods” in the Americas. That is the outage behind the Outlook errors earlier today.
The picture grew worse overnight. At 01:01 UTC on 13 November Microsoft revised the list of affected services and said it was still working to isolate what was knocking servers out. Four hours later it described a blocker still in the way while engineers brought sections of the server estate back to health. It has not named a cause, and customers are pointed to incident MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or to its public status page when the admin center will not open.
The latest update, posted at 11:11 UTC, reports that fixes have gone through on some of the hit servers, with user traffic being let back in step by step. Inbox access and the queue of late mail are the scenarios that have improved so far. What is left is applying the same fixes to the remaining servers and adding capacity so service stays steady.
For Pakistani readers the timing matters: the first report landed at about 10:54 pm on 12 November in Pakistan, so the outage has run through the whole night and into the working day here, and the 11:11 UTC update arrived at 4:11 pm Pakistan time. Companies that rely on Exchange Online for mail should expect a backlog of delayed messages to clear gradually rather than all at once, and IT teams should keep watching the incident entry instead of assuming a service is stable because it loaded once.
The next status update will show whether the rest of the affected servers have been brought back.
