Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Teams for users worldwide, including Singapore

Microsoft said an outage on Thursday, Nov. 12, caused widespread connectivity problems for Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications. The issue was reported by tens of thousands of users, including around 250 in Singapore, according to outage tracker Downdetector.

The company attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure across several regions and indicated that the problem could affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users anywhere. Initial statements focused on reports from the Americas, but the scope was later expanded.

Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 Outlook complaints shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern Time, with reports falling to about 50,000 by 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time. The tracker also recorded more than 38,000 complaints about Microsoft 365 and roughly 4,500 about Teams.

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," Microsoft wrote on X. "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service."

Microsoft later confirmed that a separate Teams disruption affecting North American users had been resolved. OpenAI and Anthropic also noted related issues with Microsoft connectors, citing broken connections and upstream provider problems.