Microsoft is restoring affected services in phases and has extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to protect messages delayed by the disruption.
Highlights:
- Outlook, Exchange Online and other Microsoft 365 services face disruptions.
- Some Teams and Copilot features dependent on Exchange are affected.
- Microsoft reports gradual improvement as recovery efforts continue.
- Email timeout window extended to 48 hours amid delivery backlogs.
- Administrators can track updates under incident reference MO1550821.
Microsoft 365 users across several regions faced disruptions on Friday, November 13, with problems affecting Outlook, Exchange Online and features connected to the company’s email infrastructure. The prolonged outage interrupted access to mailboxes, delayed email delivery and affected parts of workplace services, including Teams and Copilot.
Microsoft’s service health page confirmed service degradation affecting its business and enterprise offerings. The disruption’s impact varied across products, with Exchange-dependent features particularly affected. This means users could encounter problems with certain functions even while other parts of the same application remained available.
According to the India Today report, Microsoft said recovery was progressing in phases, although service performance remained uneven and infrastructure capacity had not fully returned to normal. The company extended the email timeout window to 48 hours while it worked through accumulated messages and delivery queues.
The extended window gives delayed messages more time to be processed before timing out. However, it does not mean every email will take 48 hours to arrive, nor does it represent a deadline for complete service restoration.
Microsoft’s updates described efforts to improve server stability by adjusting traffic handling, redistributing workloads and applying targeted restrictions. While some measures produced partial improvements, the company said those gains had initially failed to deliver sustained recovery.
For affected users, the disruption meant difficulties opening Outlook mailboxes, sending or receiving messages, and accessing work information through connected applications. Organisations relying on Microsoft’s cloud services faced interruptions to routine communication and coordination.
The supplied report also said Microsoft 365 connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic were affected. Such connector problems can interrupt access to Microsoft-hosted work information through AI tools; they do not necessarily indicate that the AI platforms themselves are entirely unavailable.
Microsoft directed administrators to incident reference MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre for detailed updates. Its public service health page provides another route to check information when administrators cannot access the usual dashboard.
The company’s reported updates indicated that restoration remained under way. Users and businesses should check the latest service notice before assuming that all affected functions have returned to normal.
