Microsoft said it had cleared the email backlog left by the outage. Its status page listed Outlook, Teams and Copilot as operating normally.
The Associated Press reported that the disruption started near midday Eastern time on Nov. 12. Downdetector logged reports from 74 countries and territories within roughly an hour, as EconoTimes reported during the outage.
Users had difficulty opening some mailboxes, and email delivery slowed. Teams chats and online meetings generally remained available, but calendar functions connected to email could fail. Some users also reported missing meeting invitations and Web pages that did not respond.
Bloomberg reported that some financial firms moved trade checks from email to phone calls, adding tasks for settlement teams, a business impact EconoTimes covered earlier.
Microsoft said elevated demand on infrastructure across several regions may have played a role in the connection problems.
