A major Microsoft outage that began around 5:30 p.m. GMT on November 12, according to Downdetector, disrupted Microsoft 365 enterprise products including Outlook, Teams and Copilot. By Friday morning, the outage appeared to be gradually winding down, with Outlook service returning for some users, though major Microsoft services were still showing problems on the company's official status page.

Users in the United States were largely back online by the time they woke up on Friday, with service returning to normal for many and social media filling with memes about getting back to work. Users in the UK were not as fortunate, waking to broken inboxes and services still broadly offline.S2

The disruption reached well beyond email. Schools and universities, NHS emergency services, pharmacies, GPs and care services, transport operators, charities, businesses, museums and government offices across the country were affected, and Bloomberg reported that surgical procedures had to be rescheduled. The Metropolitan Police website said that some online form submissions may be affected.S2

In a statement given to Mashable on Friday, Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, expressed regret for the disruption and said the company was seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. Microsoft said it was regularly updating its status page and social media channels.S2

Individual accounts of the problem were also circulating. Marginal Revolution reported that its author's Outlook email was still down, with the system only partly reopening and delivery incomplete, and advised readers to reach the author through an alternative Gmail address or Twitter in the meantime.S1