Microsoft 365 down worldwide for 5 hours; Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Claude and ChatGPT's Microsoft connectors hit

Microsoft 365 has been suffering a worldwide outage for more than five hours. The incident began at 1:26 p.m. ET on Nov 12, according to BleepingComputer, knocking out access to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot. "We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable," Microsoft said on its status account. It paused all deployments and restarted affected servers, but by about 5 p.m. ET said "our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief." An hour later it reported only "limited recovery" as some servers came back. Microsoft has not given a time for full restoration.

The outage spilled into AI tools. Anthropic said mail, calendar and search tools in Claude's Microsoft 365 connector are failing for most requests and Claude for Outlook is down, while OpenAI is investigating errors in ChatGPT's Microsoft 365 connector. Neither Claude nor ChatGPT is down overall. Downdetector logged more than 131,000 Outlook reports in the US alone, the BBC reported, and Microsoft said users "in any region" could be affected; Japan's Livedoor News reported Outlook and Copilot were unavailable there as well. "The company is already shaken by the Nvidia news, and now email is down too, so work is paralyzed," a Silicon Valley venture capitalist told South Korea's Chosun Ilbo.