A Microsoft 365 outage disrupted email, meetings and workplace tools on Friday, November 13, after problems began late on Thursday in India. Outlook, Teams and Copilot were among the affected services, leaving organisations unable to rely on their usual communication channels.
Microsoft’s public service-health page continued to show degradation for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise services, as well as consumer products, when checked on Friday afternoon IST. The same page separately said it detected no Azure issues. This is not a blanket outage of Windows PCs or every Microsoft service.
What has stopped working?
The disruption centres on Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online, the service behind many organisations’ email and calendars. Users have reported problems accessing mailboxes, joining Teams meetings and using connected work tools. SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot are also among the services affected, although availability varies between users and organisations.
The University of Queensland’s incident notice, for example, lists email, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, Bookings, Planner and other services. It says exams are continuing as scheduled. That distinction matters: an organisation losing email access does not mean all its operations have stopped.
How the outage is affecting India and other countries
The disruption has carried into India’s working day. IndiGo said its email-support services were affected and that it might not receive customer emails. According to Moneycontrol’s report on the airline’s advisory, other support channels remain available, with urgent queries directed to the 6E Skai assistant on its website or app. The advisory concerns email support, not a reported flight shutdown.
Elsewhere, BBC reporting describes delayed court communications in Singapore and the Philippines, email problems at Australian public agencies, and disruption to NHS email communications in the UK. Pharmacies warned that difficulty communicating with GP practices could delay some prescriptions. These are examples of affected workflows, not evidence that entire national services are offline.
Why ChatGPT and Claude users may notice it too
The effects extend to AI tools that connect to Microsoft accounts. OpenAI’s status notice says new Microsoft connector connections may be broken and tools may not work as expected. Anthropic’s status page says mail, calendar and search tools in Claude’s Microsoft 365 connector are failing for most requests, with Claude for Outlook also affected.
Those notices concern access to Microsoft-connected data and tools. They do not establish that ChatGPT or Claude is unavailable as a whole.
What Microsoft says about the cause and recovery
Microsoft has said servers became unexpectedly unavailable, putting extra strain on the remaining infrastructure. According to The Guardian’s reporting, the company saw improved server stability after applying an authentication and routing configuration patch to part of its infrastructure. Earlier recovery attempts had not produced sustained relief.
Microsoft says it is not aware of malicious activity causing the incident. That is not a final technical explanation: the company plans to publish a post-incident report after mitigation. The latest checked updates did not give a firm time for full restoration.
For affected users, the immediate issue is missed communication, not simply an app refusing to open. For urgent work, confirm an approved alternative contact method with your organisation rather than assuming an email has arrived. Avoid moving sensitive work into personal accounts or installing unofficial fixes. Check Microsoft’s service-health page and your organisation’s IT updates before relying on restored access.
