Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for thousands

Rewrites throughout with Microsoft's latest statement and updated details

Nov 12 (Reuters) - Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company MSFT.O remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday, with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services.

As of 6 p.m. ET, Microsoft said it was still working to return affected servers to service, and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 p.m. ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector.

The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable for the elevated load and not an increase in traffic.

"We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online," a Microsoft spokesperson said.

By 5:47 p.m. ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 user, while there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector.

The tech giant had then said the restored servers had remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.

"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," Microsoft said in a statement.

BUSINESSES FEEL THE IMPACT

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.

Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant's suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Electric truck maker Workhorse Group WKHS.O, which was expected to report third-quarter results on November 12, rescheduled it to November 16 citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.

(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese, Anzar Mehraj and Katha Kalia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Leroy Leo)

((HarshitaMary.Varghese@thomsonreuters.com;))