Key facts
- Downdetector recorded more than 38,000 user reports of Microsoft 365 problems and about 4,500 reports of trouble accessing Teams.
- Microsoft said its team paused all deployments and was restarting affected servers to return them to service.
- OpenAI said new connections through Microsoft connectors may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
- Anthropic said an upstream provider issue was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
- Downdetector's figures are user reports and the actual number of affected users may vary, Reuters reported.
Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams were down for thousands of US users on November 12, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com, which collates status reports from a number of sources. The disruption also hit connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services.
Downdetector recorded more than 97,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Outlook at 2:07 p.m. ET. It also logged more than 38,000 user reports of problems with Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams. The actual number of affected users may vary.
"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," Microsoft said in a statement. The company said its team had paused all deployments, was moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure and was restarting affected servers to return them to service.
Microsoft said earlier in the day it had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users in North America and that the impact had been fully resolved. It later said the issue may also affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in other regions.
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.