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Microsoft Outage Didn’t Lose Your Email, but Firms May Get Credits

Microsoft says its outage, which began midday Thursday and hit Outlook and other workplace apps worldwide, did not delete email. Messages keep retrying for 48 hours. Companies that pay for Microsoft 365 may be owed service credits, and Microsoft blames its own network upgrade, not AI.

By matthew jonathan

November 14, 20262 min read

Microsoft Outage Didn’t Lose Your Email, but Firms May Get Credits

A Microsoft outage that began midday Thursday and knocked out Outlook and other workplace apps worldwide did not lose users' email, the company said, because it extended its email timeout to 48 hours. Messages sent to affected users keep trying to deliver instead of bouncing back.

By Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress." Outage reports came from 74 countries within about an hour of the start. Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 apps.

The AI tools broke too. Copilot, Microsoft's assistant, could not reach users' email, files or calendars. The Microsoft connectors for OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude also failed.

Users have little to fix. Resetting a password or reinstalling Outlook will not help, though desktop Outlook may still show mail it had already downloaded.

Business customers may be owed money. Microsoft promises 99.9% uptime, which allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month. When it falls short, it offers credits of 25% to 100% of the monthly fee. A company's IT department has to file the claim.

What Microsoft blames

Microsoft first said it was "restarting affected servers to return them to service." That did not hold. Servers that came back went down again once traffic returned.

On Friday, the company traced the outage to a problem from "an earlier network capacity upgrade" that surfaced after a recent network change. It said it was "deeply sorry for the disruption."

Australia's home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft believes it is dealing with "an update that has gone awry," much like the 2024 CrowdStrike meltdown.

Microsoft has blamed its own changes or maintenance for Microsoft 365 disruptions in at least six months this year. They range from a nearly 10-hour outage in January to a spam-filter update that bounced real email earlier this month.

AI and staffing questions

The outage comes as Microsoft trims its workforce while spending heavily on AI. It offered buyouts to about 60,000 employees in October, and those who accept leave Dec. 31. CEO Satya Nadella said last year that AI writes "maybe 20%, 30%" of Microsoft's code.

Microsoft rejects any AI link. In a post on X it called the outage "a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents."

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said the company regrets "the impact these outages had on those who depend on us." He said Microsoft's teams are reviewing what happened. He did not address questions about staffing.

Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, whose fund owns Microsoft stock, said Thursday that Microsoft is "the gateway to how people interact with the basic workflows of a desk worker." That, he said, makes it "a much more difficult position to dislodge."

Chris Versace, chief investment officer at Tematica Research, said: "The outage and how it hobbled many businesses and other enterprises is a reminder about the need for redundancies."