The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
In maintenance, sometimes the dumb solution is the best. The servers that ran amazon.com had a memory leak and were subsequently restarted. This hack continues for years because it was the most cost-effective thing to do.
Put another way, if they didn’t turn it off and on again, I would think less of them because that’s the first thing you should always do unless you know better
I worked on multi-million dollar airplanes. If a pilot called me with an issue and hadn't rebooted the plane (on the ground), I wouldn't even talk to them. Rebooting isn't always a bad solution to technology.
It's not a bad solution, it definitely should be tried. But I'm still rather shocked to see it in official notes, especially this "late" in the timeline.
Powercycling is a designed method to bailout Cisco routers. If you botch a configuration command and lose connection, you can have someone powercycle it to restore you last good configuration. Its not just a joke it really works more often than I'd like to admit.
copilot, make this doom and gloom situation sound better. assume you're using the voice of a friendly but intensely focused sysadmin. use only neutral language.
So the servers are ok but many of the health checks are failing and so the servers are taken off rotation, increasing load on other servers. I'm sure it's more complicated than it seems but from my POV this looks like amateur hour at Microsoft.
I'm not thrilled with what they've done to Windows lately myself, but this is just rude.
You know a lot of talented people who work there also post here, and it's not fair to insinuate that they aren't talented because some vastly complex system somewhere in the world had a bad day.
Stuff happens, things break. That's why lots of nines cost a lot of money. It doesn't automatically mean that anyone is incompetent.
Lots of nines means they have SLAs of no significant downtime. It does not guarantee that the SLAs can never be missed, just that there will be consequences when it is missed. Lawyers and accountants and sales folks will sort out the compensation payments that come back to the customers and try to negotiate relationships back to a healthy state.
Individual talent is irrelevant when you have a company culture that rewards the opposite of that. Any talented person working at Microsoft knows that they are dealing with structural problem that force MS products to be massive piles of shit. There isn't much an talented individual can do about that.
To be fair: I want the people who can speak most competently to a problem to be working on it versus writing commentary. Those highly-technical people can shine in the postmortem report.
I disagree; the communication aspects - including external - are a hugely important part of any incident response. IME the biggest challenges in these situations are the many levels & combinations of communication and coordination. You don't need your best DevOps person doing it, but there should be plenty of competent technical product managers or engineering managers who could do this well.
And that is a good thing. Well, maybe not good. But the last thing you need in a crisis is to pull people away from fixing the problem and make them type up status updates. Admittedly, having tech knowledge would help the writers - a technical incident management team would be better. But ain't nothing wrong with letting the PR folks write up words while the tech folk work on problem solving.
Amateur hour? Not sure if you've lived through one of these cascading failures, but they are hard to design against, hard to load/chaos test for, and hard to recover from. The key is that this is a dynamic load, not a static load; and it's normally amplified by uncontrolled retry behavior by clients.
In retrospect, the cause and cure are obvious to everyone.
Many of us insist upon not building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about precisely for this reason.
Most of the time we get demonized by resume-driven developers job-hopping every few years (seems like the lack of deep expertise is working out). Today we get to laugh at their expense. These problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.
Except for the fact that it seems like most Microsoft outages are self owns. I'm not sure how many times we've had outages due to bad deployments that somehow made it to their global infrastructure and only got noticed when customers notified.
Plenty of internal accounts from previous employees highlight this.
This sounds suspiciously what occurred when I was working at a large motor sports company. We had a major release of new year models coming out on the website. The deployment went super smooth and then in about 30 mins the site was crashing. Since we were a huge MS client, almost everything we ran was all MS top to bottom.
Site was taken offline, war rooms ensued. 48 hours later, an Ops team from Redmond was flown out. Another three days and they determined it was several legacy servers were going down and the load balancing servers were getting hit so hard, they also failed. It was a cascading effect that killed everything.
CIO was pissed. The company got absolutely lit up on every social media channel for their ineptitude. The CIO vowed it would never happen again, they were upgrading the entire network and infrastructure to avoid it happening again. Fast forward six months to the next major release. Same thing, same panic, same cascading failures because servers were collapsing under the traffic to the website. Another war room, another Ops team flies out. Two days later they figured out it was some buggy code that was causing it.
This after 8 rounds of load balancing testing to the tune of 10X the amount of traffic the site sees on these major release dates without so much as a hiccup.
I left two months later, but the overall feeling was the same - total amateur hour from Microsoft after our company was gifted major discounts to go all in with their hardware & network gear. The company found out the hard way it wasn't a smart decision.
The scary part was this some 20 years ago - seems like not much has changed considering how frequently Github is down now too.
Newest update says that wasn't the issue after all. They say relatively small loads are actually causing servers to become unresponsive and have to be restarted.
They still don't know why this "core process" is maxing out the processor for no reason.
I can't stand it when I see armchair analysts making claims like this.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that.... but from my POV, which is extremely limited and informed by what others online tell me.... that this is amateur hour
What would it take for it to be professional hour?
I feel bad for the people working on this. It sounds like desperation is increasing.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
From the 9:41:46 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
From the 9:01:14 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
From the 8:44 PM UTC update:
Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
they are furiously typing at their agents hoping they can figure out what to do. Getting glimps of hope everytime claude says "I found it." only for their hopes to be crused at "Turns out ...". The clown show at Microsoft is surreal.
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
While I think it's a bit premature to jump to "AI is at fault", and I will emphasize that I appreciate Microsoft's transparency in their status updates, these updates do have much more of a "we don't know what's going on" feel than any other major outage I can think of.
It's been hours, and the status updates still feel like there is an undertone of frantic panic (understood if you can't determine the root cause). When I think of past major outages, they may have been down for hours but usually folks knew what the root cause was relatively early, even if remediation took some time.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI coding and release pressure was a primary cause, so I really hope the future post-mortem is made publicly available.
I wouldn't call my experience expert, but I have way more than a passing familiarity with Exchange. I really like the product a lot (and always wished MSFT would build Linux versions of it and Active Directory-- or, better yet, open source it). I think it provides a reasonably reliable and easy to administer on-prem "groupware" system that makes users productive (at least in my experience-- I know other people have different opinions).
I certainly don't use it for my self-hosted email, but I never felt bad introducing it into a Customer's Windows environment as something I knew they could always find somebody else to administer in my stead relatively cheaply and easily.
I've heard the infrastructure behind Exchange Online would be at least somewhat recognizable to an Exchange sysadmin. I know there's a ton more edifice surrounding Exchange Online, as compared to the plebeian on-prem Exchange systems I've gotten to touch, that I'd have no understanding of but I'm dying to know how it's breaking. I really look forward to a post mortem.
Moreover, I really feel for the people doing the work right now. I can't imagine having that pit-of-my-stomach feeling of not knowing what's wrong with a system at this scale and with stakes this high.
I don't agree with everything MSFT is doing in the market today. I've also never fully gotten over the suspicion I have for their motives going all the way back to the Halloween documents. None of that stops me from feeling empathy for my fellow IT workers who are doing the work on this outage today.
Nah, they're just debugging a hard problem while the world looks on! The 'normal' problems they have processes to work through, but hey emergent systems and all that - they have to expect the unexpected.
My last email was received at 5.5 hours ago. Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working. All our Azure infrastructure seems fine so this is something 365-specific.
Everyone has occasional outages but this is the worst 365 outage our org has seen since starting with M365 in 2019.
Update from Microsoft:
"We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly.
"We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses."
Update as of 10 minutes ago implies that didn't work:
> Current status: We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
So health checks were correct… this solution of silencing the first symptom is probably just adding to the problem. I am afraid they may be opening the door for the fire trucks and getting some other kind of intrusion instead. Better they shut it down for day and do proper fix.
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
---
The 10:11:39 PM UTC update is a little chilling. They don't know why what's happening is happening so they're doing experiments.
I do that with closed-source software when I don't want to bother trying reverse engineer it, but these guys have the code! Yikes.
I recognize that even w/ the code available there are likely behaviors that aren't likely to be anticipated because of the scale of traffic. Complex systems fail in complex and non-intuitive ways.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
The code by itself doesn't tell you how the various components of a complex distributed system interact in a failure condition with clients hammering retries.
I mean it sort of does if you know the whole system inside and out and have the ability to reason about it, but just having the code for each component doesn't by itself solve the real problem of understanding
> For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account
I can conjecture some reasons. Datamining would be high on the list, since MS can read your mail and thus market to you more effectively. Governments might also be happier if MS can provide them with one-stop access (like Prism) to otherwise self-hosted e-mail accounts proxied through a central server.
I would strongly doubt (though not completely rule out) that Microsoft is reading your personal mail hosted on your personal mail server. Like what would that even look like, their IMAP client is forwarding email to headquarters?
BUT, more likely, it's some sort of "check in" or "dial home" feature that isn't working. Or plausibly, maybe they count "local user checked email" and their analytics endpoint is down.
Regardless, it's definitely surprising that a traditional desktop application would be blocking when only polling from local/trusted data sources.
"New" Outlook does route all traffic through Microsoft servers. I assume it's so you can get a "unified" mail look on all your devices (phone, etc), but likely a nice source of data mining
Personally, I can't reconcile having a self-hosted email server and using Outlook to access said email.
I'm being an ass in saying this, because I'm aware human motivation is a beautiful kaleidoscope of variables, but I would have guessed at the venn diagram of 'those willing to compromise and use a Microsoft product' is mutually exclusive with that of the 'I'm hardcore enough to self-host email'.
I will say, however, that Outlook used to be one of the better desktop email programs, so I'll grant some legacy lenience.
Biggest data heist and most obvious US intelligence operation in human history. I can't fathom why AVs don't treat "Outlook New" as info stealer malware.
I’m pretty certain their desktop client applies filters server-side.
I’m pretty certain because my company’s phishing-test emails skip my filters (I assume admins have a “skip filters” toggle). Which, hilariously, makes it even easier to ensure there’s a place that contains only phishing test emails (filter all not on allow-list of domains to one place, filter all on that list to another, ta-da, the main inbox now contains only phishing test emails)
I assume they do the same thing with non-MS email if you use their client, rather than maintain two filter implementations.
Well, my mac CI runs aren't being picked up, and they eventually fail because of it. So maybe wherever connects the orchestrator to the machines is having issues.
> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Probably self inflicted by some code change, as they mention "specific type of service traffic".
EDIT: Seems like now they confirmed that: "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service."
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
> Previous status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
If failures started at some point in time then something must have changed just prior to that. If no changes in traffic were detected (no DDOS) then it must have been a change, be it code or config. Duuuh.
> then something must have changed just prior to that
Not at all, they could have simply hit an unexpected behavior for their infra they hadn't seen, tested, or expected before. Global scale infra gets very, very complex, and tbh this is Microsoft... they're not very good at it.
Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems. It's usually config change or code change, not necessarily in the component that's misbehaving, but it is somewhere.
As someone who worked in infrastructure for a large global CDN, this sort of overload issues happen all the time when trying to bring infrastructure back online after an issue.
First, you have every client retrying connections, whether automated or manual retries. This generates extra load over normal.
In addition, whichever systems come online first often get a ton of traffic sent to them, which can immediately bring them back down if you don't have ways to prevent it. You will get a wave of systems coming back online, a ton of traffic hitting them, and then falling over again.
Now, I am sure Microsoft is used to this and has procedures and systems in place to mitigate the issues (I know we did).
However, sometimes if the right combination of services are failing, even the strategies you had to avoid this sort of failure can themselves fail.
I know it’s not actually that easy but don’t they just have some gateway that’s rejecting 100% of requests and they very gently lower that intentional rejection percentage over time?
Funny thing is that my work's VPN that uses the MS authenticator just quit, immediately after I made that comment. So you are even more correct than usual.
I asked someone in our teams meeting if they were having issues with their outlook today. What followed was a 5 minute hate fest on outlook. I'm not a big fan, but was kind of surprised so many people genuinely hate it.
down detector always looks like this during big cloud service outages. i think partly because people don't actually know what services they're using and report wrong things, and partly because downdetector parses social media posts like "outlook is down but gmail still works" as outlook and gmail both being down.
Downdetector is a survey, not a detector, and suffers from user confusion when a high-profile service is actually down, as users start reporting unrelated things
The biggest problem with downdetector is how they visualise their outage graphs.
The Y axes are entirely independent, and so when there's an outage for Microsoft Outlook (which peaked at ~130k reports) and you get a negligable spike in pepole who get confused and report gmail (~1k reports), the graphs all look correlated and connected.
They need to show the graphs with an absolute y-axis set by the worst outage, or scale the graphs by estimated average daily users or something.
Yeah every IT dept is sending out that notification. Someone replied with 'When do you expect it to be back online?" to which I LOL emoted at the moment. I think I'm a jerk. But how can you ask such a question- as if they planned a time to restore services and aren't working to restore it as quickly as possible?
All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.
The snarky but honest response is HackerNews/Reddit. But if you're trying for something that actually checks the sites you point it at instead of relying on users reporting "issues", a buddy of mine runs https://onlineornot.com/ and it seems generally more reliable.
Full Disclosure, this is a Cisco product and I work there.
ThousandEyes Internet Insights offers a public outage map at https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/ that is MASSIVELY more accurate (and faster to detect) than Down Detector because its based on actual telemetry and not on crowdsourcing.
Yes, just to confirm, it seems that our platform is getting hammered at the moment and it's causing the page to take a long time to load or intermittently load. We are looking into it.
There will be a more detailed message when we finish the SII on our status page at the link I previously provided, but the short version is we took way more traffic than normal to our platform and the related workers were running out of memory.
The public outage map is primarily a marketing page, because customers receive deeper insights in-product. Given that most people discuss outages live/up-to-the-minute on Twitter, that is why its where we default to sharing.
It seems like one of the best methodologies there is? Real people reporting real outages of a service they use?
I often know about outages dozens of minutes in advance of it being posted on official channels (or in the case of AWS, three days later...).
So what if the resolution is low because people can't log in to Fortnite and an Azure outage gets shown as an Epic Games outage. Doesn't matter. The live feed is incredibly reassuring from a "down for anyone else this instant, before official status page has a chance to see it?" Saves me so much time knowing whether it's a me-or-them issue.
How is it garbage? It's crowdsourced monitoring so sure, there will be false positives (especially when aws/cloudflare/azure/bgp services have a bad day), but it's one of the best indicators to quickly know if _something_ is going on.
not really, soon as i had a problem with outlook i went there and already saw user reports and a massive spike confirming it wasn't anything on my end.
As someone who ends up being unofficial downdetector-primary at a company, dealing with this shit and the fact that people cannot comprehend its mis-attribtion wastes so much of my time.
At the other extreme is Microsoft's own dashboard (https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status) whose methodology is so "rigorous" that it probably won't show anything about today's outage until next week, if at all!
My housemate texted me saying our internet is so slow because outlook wasn't loading. So I think lots of people associate email not working with entire internet not working..
With how many people are unable to associate a "broken" monitor with an unplugged HDMI/DisplayPort or power cable, it doesn't surprise me that most people would not make a disctinction between the "internet" and "Outlook".
This happens every time there's an outage. People see their email not working and go there and mark everything as down regardless of whether it is affected or not. There's nothing wrong with Gmail or AWS or Cloudflare or Facebook.
This usually isn't a software quality issue, it's overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment causing additional systems to fall over.
AI is good at incident diagnosis, but AI slop code may have actually caused this: designing to avoid cascading failures is something AI doesn't do so well
The place where I consistently see AI/LLMS/Agents/language-widgets-with-tools fail at making decent code (and more often configuration) is infrastructure.
The number of times it has spit out a python program where a much simpler bash script would do, is too many to count.
I have a pet theory that if you don't know what you really want, and aren't skilled enough to understand what you got, infra code is THE WORST.
Anecdote: I wanted a simple change to an ansible playbook today. GPT-6-Astra/codex came up with the most convoluted, brittle solution possible the first time, even though it was extending and already clear, idiomatic playbook. It took some amount of offensive and critical prompting to get it to use ansible's built in modules and tooling to do the same job - and do so with nearly 80% less configuration and like 1000% more human readability.
Some part of me harbours a sneaking suspicion that the "throw everything at it" ethos is by design, not as a defensive measure against crappy code, but as a way to ensure there's so much code and it's so convoluted orgs and operators (or developers) are stuck/addicted.
It's still a force multiplier - but it's by no means driverless, especially for existing/already-running infra.
I work as a (depressed lol) sysadmin apprentice in a small MSP company (I live in Europe) and boy do I got a story about Ansible playbooks: We made an offer to one of our clients to automate the deployment of software to their computers (this is a client with around 150-200 employees, depending on whether you count only the "core" employees or also security and maintenance staff). Before we made and implemented this offer using Ansible, they did not have any sort of Software Deployment tool whatsoever, everything got installed fully manually.
(they also used to have local admin rights on all of their client computers until one employee got phished and literally gave away their personal ID card via a webcam)
In any case, guess who got to implement all the relevant playbooks for installing software and what tool they used for it? Our company literally handed the job to an intern who had no IT background whatsoever. I say this not to be mean, he was legitimately just at our company because a government program required him to do an internship.
He used Deepseek (our company does not believe in purchasing LLM subscriptions, at least not for us normal employees) to write literally all of the playbooks for any kind of software that mattered to our clients.
Now, as I said before, I am only an apprentice, and I am certainly not a good programmer by any means, but I read through parts of the Ansible documentation and had worked with it before, and I understood enough to at least be able to roughly judge whether a playbook made sense or was just way too complicated and convoluted.
I had to help this intern out multiple times, because he hadn't yet understood that, in order to write a functioning playbook, you first had to somewhat understand how to deploy a piece of software on a single test machine using CMD or Powershell syntax with an according .exe or .msi.
He simply prompted, pasted the playbook and then reprompted with the error codes from the failed playbook until it somehow worked or until I had to help him out.
This took place in December or November of last year and the playbooks are mostly still pretty shitty if I am being honest.
I did take away an important lesson from this "episode", though: LLMs can be very usefuly for writing code, or in this case, Ansible playbooks, but only if you have a somewhat decent and basic grasp of how software installation works via CMD/powershell and if you took the time to read through and learn about at least the basic Ansible concepts.
Since I am only an apprentice (on paper and in terms of my knowledge and how I get paid, not in terms of how much I am expected to earn for the company), I have painfully experienced how important it is to possess a certain level of understanding about the infra-related code and scripts that you would like LLMs to write for you, because otherwise it very quickly spirals out of control and starts throwing everything at the problem, just as you described.
With engineering rigor. They are fantastic tools for quickly navigating large codebases, ingesting large amounts of data, refactoring legacy code, compiling multiple formats of data, following defined patterns, and many other proper uses for the tools.
That doesn’t mean the code/result doesn’t still need to meet our engineering standards.
> Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
One of the best ways to deal with doing something the wrong way is to get rid of all the people who know how to do it correctly. That way no one knows any better, so no one has to confront the fact they're actually doing it wrong.
I really don't see the correlation, actually. On the contrary, I'm finding nasty defects with it that have been dormant for long and handwaved away, with repros to reveal them.
It's been full speed downhill for many years, and the failure modes are pretty distinct.
It's insane that Microsoft continues to have global outages. Tech debt is real, service delivery on a planetary level means change is measured and deliberate, but...it's been years. YEARS.
I suspect some possible relation to SignDrop or attempts to patch it.
SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.
Not impossible, but very unlikely. CLFS isn’t remotely reachable, it's a kernel driver reached through local API calls and has no network listener. AFAIK the historical CLFS CVEs are all rated as local.
> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
GitHub the other day went down because of an influx of anonymous users. Microsoft has hinted that surging connections caused the outage. I wonder if these two are linked?
Everyone that is a whole stack programmer (say, kernel to webapp) has seen just how unnecessarily complicated everything has become. Watching it burn to the ground would be a pornographic miracle.
> Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.
The speed of change has accelerated drastically at some organizations, so even if quality stayed the same, the number of outages would increase because of the # of changes has condensed to happen over much shorter time frames.
A layoff of any real size has negative impacts to their unemployment insurance premiums and restricts their ability to file PERM for employees. Meeting those targets with voluntary separation prevents those impacts.
That’s not entirely accurate. Washington State pays unemployment, not the company. The state funds unemployment by taxing payrolls, but it’s much more indirect than most people think.
Claims do affect the rate they pay next year, but the company isn’t “on the hook” for you personally, at least not any more than they are for your social security income.
I think both parties probably benefit; people who are more likely to take the offer are those who have another reason to leave (unfulfilled, etc). This will benefit the company in the long run because they can eventually replace them with someone who want to join (people applying for the job).
Can go the other way though: people who've been there for a while, are motivated and back themselves to get another job will take redundancy (i.e. the people you want to keep).
People who aren't motivated and/or don't back themselves to get another job will stay (i.e. probably the people you want to get rid of)
You can at will fire but that doesnt stop lawsuits. Most of these require signing docs to get the payout. It is a way to cut cleanly and derisk the cut
The fact that it is always Big Even Number shows how stupid it is. Imagine if it was serious like "23.5176%" then you'd know they actually did their homework on leaning up operations instead of just cutting off limbs and seeing if it can still walk or not.
The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"
Updates below in reverse chronological order:
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:
Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.
More info: Potentially impacted services include:
- Exchange Online
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Copilot 365
- Microsoft Defender XDR
Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.
More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:
- Outlook on the web
- Messaging API (MAPI)
- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)
- Representational State Transfer (REST) API
Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.
Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC
---
Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.
Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.
Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).
That was never the promise. The nearest to that is the promise of multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, but neither of those have anything to do with outages of specific Microsoft services.
The "you can't possibly have better redundancy in your on-prem" was absolutely a sales pitch I heard to move to Microsoft 365.
The biggest site I work for, who went M365 hybrid last year, has incurred more Exchange downtime today than they had all of last year with their on-prem Exchange servers.
The service has redundancy, better than individual operators could provide on-prem. From the customer standpoint though, the service as a whole is a single point of failure: it either works or it doesn't.
It sounds like you are talking more about product reliability of M365 than you are about enterprise infrastructure reliability. M365 is a Microsoft product. M365 has no bearing on the credibility of cloud infrastructure as a whole, which is what your original comment spoke to.
YEah, that is not loading, along with the root status.cloud.microsoft , which MS links in their Xitter update [0]
What MS has posted so far:
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
12:54 PM · Nov 12, 2026
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> 20m
>> We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
if the admin center is not available to you.
That kind of depends on what you mean by "Outlook".
Sure, the program on your desktop computer is fine, but the Outlook app on your phone routes everything through MSFT's servers, so you may be impacted. Outlook.com is running EWS, so it would be down as well.
And finally, if you're talking to a layperson, they're not going to know what Exchange is. They just know they opened Outlook and it isn't working.
anyone else just watch the admin portal post an update and then roll it back to the previous update....guess it didn't work. "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service." was the old message from 7:52 UTC now it rolled back to 7:30 UTC update again
Outlook calendar won't load? Is this part of the outage? Unfortunately, I downloaded several updates and rebooted. I'm not sure if this is because of the updates or the Microsoft outage.
I note that Microsoft became heavily off-shored, on-shored and AI-pilled/vibe-coded in recent years. With lots of layoffs of the highest caliber and/or most experienced engineers.
"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."
russian hackers in Kazan hopping thru
Sluck Belarus South Africa Brazil hitting MS backdoor w/ zero day Cve-2026-124194 RuskiNet group hit East U in Boydtin Virginia. Pro Iranian.
Amateur hour at Microsoft.
It baffles me how many companies can’t figure out how to make a status page that can handle the high loads it’ll have to sustain when the service they monitor is down. That’s pretty much the only reason to have a status page in the first place.
"While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior."
It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.
It took 30 seconds to open a "local" file in Word, and my Outlook email wasn't updating.
In other words, a day that ends in "y".
My company was recently acquired by a company that uses Office, so I'm using Microsoft products for the first time in 15 years. It's absolutely APPALLING how bad they are. I assumed they got fairly usable in the last 15 years, but it seems they've gone backwards.
For all my gripes about GSuite, ... I don't know how businesses can justify using software this bad.
I'm in a similar situation, using Microsoft again after 13+ years. Outlook and teams I expected to be garbage, but Word and Excel was really surprising. I get it that everyone has that one feature of excel that is not available in gSuite so they need it. But UX in general is so much superior at Google it's baffling how they let it's workhorse fall behind so much.
> Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.
Azure communication services (ACS - transactional emails) also appears to be down. Quite amazing one thing can roll out and break so many Microsoft services at once.
For whatever reason 6.1 Sol is completely lobotomized for me this morning, so it wasn't helping much with the investigation, but it was pretty clear that MSFT was having issues.
I have a teams app with Outlook integration and received a bunch of 502s to smba.trafficmanager.net and a my logs are riddled with "RestError Temporary connection issue when contacting service. Please wait before retrying request"
I will say this, having apps deployed on Slack and Teams, Slack rarely has issues (an exponential backoff is enough to simply never worry about my Slack integration). With Teams I have mysterious failures to debug at least 2x a year - and they're often not very transparent about them (often my first instinct is to search Twitter and find people complaining about the same thing).
Strangely, Teams chat is working fine here. Anything in Teams that is tied to other parts of O365, including the calendar, is dead. I'm currently watching a training video on sharepoint.com, so that's fine too, for now.
While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.
My company is being pressured very aggressively by Microsoft to migrate all our users from us-managed Exchange to Microsoft-managed Exchange Online. Guess which users still have email today and which do not…
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. I wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.
Did Anthropic's new release this week include an AI rollout plan (i.e. not approved by humans) to take down Office and Outlook for a lot of enterprises? I half-snarkily ask since we have seen "rogue AI" headlines before.
A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.
Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.
Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.
The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.
And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.
Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...
Exchange has been a circus for years. I think that's why everyone went O365 in the first place. Managing to have a paid up configuration where you go down when a cloud provider goes down but you're hosting it locally is absolutely stupid and I am laughing my ass off here.
Also laughing at our ops guys who are now absolutely helpless and have people phoning them. I warned about this on our risk call and it was seen as low probability low risk. I hope it's down for a few hours :)
I don't think many orgs are using "new Outlook" to connect to on-prem Exchange because you miss a lot if you're only doing it via IMAP and "new" still doesn't support on-prem Exchange any other way. So all my clients are using classic Outlook with their on-prem Exchange servers (and really if they have EXO too because new Outlook isn't very good).
It's been gone-as-a-default for a few months now, but for a long time, "Classic Outlook" aggressively offered a one-toggle upgrade path to "New Outlook", and it got used.
Sure, "New Outlook" on Windows is still entirely broken (including stuff like, oh, re-ordering mailboxes), but on Mac it's actually quite usable, and even allows you to switch off the IMAP proxying.
Office 365 parts goes down all the time. Usually around 20:00 CEST time, not sure if that is prime change time over in the USA but very handy as it is usually fixed next day.
GH and MS have been having a tough past couple weeks. Actions (hosted on shitty azure cloud) have been piss poor lately. I am honestly surprised GH and MSFT have the gall to continue advertising 99.9% uptime [1]
Three 9's is .36525 days per year. So if this one is resolved within 8 hours, that's about .999 uptime. (assuming they only have one such outage this year.)
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
7:52 PM UTC:
We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC:
We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC:
We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC:
We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
That's a very painful lesson in "the cloud is just someone else's computer" to a crowd that normally are exposed to ideas like "software and IT are not our core competency"
The idea is that it's someone else's computers that are managed more comprehensively than you could reasonably do yourself. But if you choose Microsoft to provide such a service for you, I don't know what to tell you.
To be honest, Microsoft has much better chance of actually achieving that (almost) 100% uptime than your company's own IT department self-hosting things.
I like to dogpile on M$ as much as the next guy, but this feels like a heavy strawman.
> I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
At no point is "keeping people alive" mentioned. Businesses use email for everything. Businesses usually don't care about where their email server is hosted. They just want to send emails. They shouldn't have to care either. I don't put blame on a business that happened to choose Outlook, one of the largest email providers, to host their email.
It's a shame there isn't a well-standardized, free and open protocol for delivering email that could be run on inexpensive modestly provisioned hardware.
I mean, they made us take down our departmental run email (presumably postfix) and forced us to make them aliases to university-wide exchange (with crappy support for open source mail clients no less). So I don't think my org is Innocent here...
Nah, no way they're getting rid of their M.C.-Escher-esque 'Forefront' mail-disappearance-machine-that-nobody-in-Microsoft-seems-to-understand-or-control, but, yeah, even their Internet-facing infrastructure seems unhappy:
451 4.3.2 Temporary server error. Please try again later ATTR2 [MI3PEPF00008486.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-12Txxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch?
Would they ever admit it if that were the case?
I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)
I want to believe that cause is that all the world's computing power is dedicated to calculating the incredibly large balance in my checking account but my desire is the only thing I can find to support that hypothesis.
It is basically nothing once you remember the cloud isn't one computer either. I want to say Azure was already millions of (beefy ass) severs over hundreds of datacenter locations organized into dozens of zones, and not all of those servers in each region are assigned to the same sets of services.
6.9 Tbps to get it done in a single day is even 3x less than the minimum on Steam in the last 48 hours https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ and they don't even have GTA VI to distribute.
Why would this be the case? Games preloading has been a thing for many years. This isnt like an MMO launch that there is additional impact when the game is being played.
Sure GTA6 may be a slight uptick in the amount of data being downloaded like any new game being released, but I would wager that the amount of data they are normally pushing out for downloads just on a regular basis (wether new purchases, redownloading games, game pass, etc) is already quite high.
Copied this from my post in the other thread:
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
Not really a big deal, but it is presently 8pm UTC time. I'm curious why their RSS feed seems to be 2 hours off?
Ah no that was a mistake on my part! RSS Feed was in EST and I misremembered the difference
They are turning it off and on again. I don't even. If this works, our industry is cooked as the kids say.
In maintenance, sometimes the dumb solution is the best. The servers that ran amazon.com had a memory leak and were subsequently restarted. This hack continues for years because it was the most cost-effective thing to do.
Put another way, if they didn’t turn it off and on again, I would think less of them because that’s the first thing you should always do unless you know better
I suppose you might want to first rule out a break-in, and if there is one, recover evidence that won't survive a reboot.
I worked on multi-million dollar airplanes. If a pilot called me with an issue and hadn't rebooted the plane (on the ground), I wouldn't even talk to them. Rebooting isn't always a bad solution to technology.
It's not a bad solution, it definitely should be tried. But I'm still rather shocked to see it in official notes, especially this "late" in the timeline.
It's not a solution at all. It's a symptom.
(on the ground) is probably pretty key, though. Ha ha. I can imagine the conversation if this was in the air.
Rebooting is also the only solution for some problems.
looks at the Boeing 787
Amateur hour. Everyone knows professionals say "power cycling" instead to make it sound complicated.
the layman understands both of those words and their meaning together.
we "bounce" the servers when on calls with customers.
Powercycling is a designed method to bailout Cisco routers. If you botch a configuration command and lose connection, you can have someone powercycle it to restore you last good configuration. Its not just a joke it really works more often than I'd like to admit.
Absolutely bizarre wording of these updates. Strangest corporate speak with urgency turned up to the max.
copilot, make this doom and gloom situation sound better. assume you're using the voice of a friendly but intensely focused sysadmin. use only neutral language.
So the servers are ok but many of the health checks are failing and so the servers are taken off rotation, increasing load on other servers. I'm sure it's more complicated than it seems but from my POV this looks like amateur hour at Microsoft.
At Microsoft every hour is amateur hour.
Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll get better after they layoff 60,000 people.
Don't worry, their replacements will receive very clear instructions instructing them to make no mistakes.
I'm not thrilled with what they've done to Windows lately myself, but this is just rude.
You know a lot of talented people who work there also post here, and it's not fair to insinuate that they aren't talented because some vastly complex system somewhere in the world had a bad day.
Stuff happens, things break. That's why lots of nines cost a lot of money. It doesn't automatically mean that anyone is incompetent.
i agree with everything you said here except the last part.
lots of nines means not having significant downtime. we passed 99.99% hours ago, and we're on the way to 99.9%
Lots of nines means they have SLAs of no significant downtime. It does not guarantee that the SLAs can never be missed, just that there will be consequences when it is missed. Lawyers and accountants and sales folks will sort out the compensation payments that come back to the customers and try to negotiate relationships back to a healthy state.
Stuff happens and things break everywhere but right now at Microsoft they break badly and often, that points to actual issues.
Almost certainly not the fault of individual people, it's a management failure of course
There are lots of talented amateurs. What separates professionals is standards, quality, teamwork, etc.
I agree there are many talented people at Microsoft, but I don’t see the professionalism in this incident.
Individual talent is irrelevant when you have a company culture that rewards the opposite of that. Any talented person working at Microsoft knows that they are dealing with structural problem that force MS products to be massive piles of shit. There isn't much an talented individual can do about that.
Copilot hour!
The people writing these updates are very obviously not technical and are least one step removed from the actual work being done to fix this.
To be fair: I want the people who can speak most competently to a problem to be working on it versus writing commentary. Those highly-technical people can shine in the postmortem report.
I disagree; the communication aspects - including external - are a hugely important part of any incident response. IME the biggest challenges in these situations are the many levels & combinations of communication and coordination. You don't need your best DevOps person doing it, but there should be plenty of competent technical product managers or engineering managers who could do this well.
And that is a good thing. Well, maybe not good. But the last thing you need in a crisis is to pull people away from fixing the problem and make them type up status updates. Admittedly, having tech knowledge would help the writers - a technical incident management team would be better. But ain't nothing wrong with letting the PR folks write up words while the tech folk work on problem solving.
Actual tech write-ups can come later.
Amateur hour? Not sure if you've lived through one of these cascading failures, but they are hard to design against, hard to load/chaos test for, and hard to recover from. The key is that this is a dynamic load, not a static load; and it's normally amplified by uncontrolled retry behavior by clients.
In retrospect, the cause and cure are obvious to everyone.
Many of us insist upon not building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about precisely for this reason.
Most of the time we get demonized by resume-driven developers job-hopping every few years (seems like the lack of deep expertise is working out). Today we get to laugh at their expense. These problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.
> building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about
What a great phrase!, can I use that in conversation?
Except for the fact that it seems like most Microsoft outages are self owns. I'm not sure how many times we've had outages due to bad deployments that somehow made it to their global infrastructure and only got noticed when customers notified.
Plenty of internal accounts from previous employees highlight this.
This sounds suspiciously what occurred when I was working at a large motor sports company. We had a major release of new year models coming out on the website. The deployment went super smooth and then in about 30 mins the site was crashing. Since we were a huge MS client, almost everything we ran was all MS top to bottom.
Site was taken offline, war rooms ensued. 48 hours later, an Ops team from Redmond was flown out. Another three days and they determined it was several legacy servers were going down and the load balancing servers were getting hit so hard, they also failed. It was a cascading effect that killed everything.
CIO was pissed. The company got absolutely lit up on every social media channel for their ineptitude. The CIO vowed it would never happen again, they were upgrading the entire network and infrastructure to avoid it happening again. Fast forward six months to the next major release. Same thing, same panic, same cascading failures because servers were collapsing under the traffic to the website. Another war room, another Ops team flies out. Two days later they figured out it was some buggy code that was causing it.
This after 8 rounds of load balancing testing to the tune of 10X the amount of traffic the site sees on these major release dates without so much as a hiccup.
I left two months later, but the overall feeling was the same - total amateur hour from Microsoft after our company was gifted major discounts to go all in with their hardware & network gear. The company found out the hard way it wasn't a smart decision.
The scary part was this some 20 years ago - seems like not much has changed considering how frequently Github is down now too.
Newest update says that wasn't the issue after all. They say relatively small loads are actually causing servers to become unresponsive and have to be restarted.
They still don't know why this "core process" is maxing out the processor for no reason.
I can't stand it when I see armchair analysts making claims like this.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that.... but from my POV, which is extremely limited and informed by what others online tell me.... that this is amateur hour
What would it take for it to be professional hour?
They rolled back the 7:52 UTC update to the 730 one now....guess it didnt work
This is like getting transmissions from Cassini before it falls into saturn.
Why is there not a single mention that this could be a cyberattack? Is the issue only affecting the USA?
No, my family is in Europe and Australia and also seeing it.
Nope. Europe (eastern) for sure included too.
UK seeing it
Brazil too
Because there's no indications that it is the case, at least for the time being.
Australia affected as well.
Japan is also seeing the issue. It is probably a global issue.
It doesn't look like a cyberattack at all, talking about fixing health checks and the like looks much more like broken automation.
Impacting us here in Australia, our company is having fun today.
I feel bad for the people working on this. It sounds like desperation is increasing.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
From the 9:41:46 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
From the 9:01:14 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
From the 8:44 PM UTC update:
Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
they are furiously typing at their agents hoping they can figure out what to do. Getting glimps of hope everytime claude says "I found it." only for their hopes to be crused at "Turns out ...". The clown show at Microsoft is surreal.
I suspect that they are not. Copilot is also down :O
their employer brought me agent swarms supposed to take over my php-serving machines. whatever this is, I don't feel sorry for them.
So the thundering herd wins again
Ugh. There's some yahoo from NewsNation on WGN Radio right now saying this is because of the Chinese, and obliquely linking it to Nvidia.
Reddit-level speculation.
My girlfriends work she is hearing this from office employees. Kind of scary how much the public gets wrong.
Working in reverse-chronological order here:
So much for seeming hopeful.
From the 12:08:53 AM UTC update:
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
Sounds like nobody knows how their own systems work anymore.
That's because it's all ai
While I think it's a bit premature to jump to "AI is at fault", and I will emphasize that I appreciate Microsoft's transparency in their status updates, these updates do have much more of a "we don't know what's going on" feel than any other major outage I can think of.
It's been hours, and the status updates still feel like there is an undertone of frantic panic (understood if you can't determine the root cause). When I think of past major outages, they may have been down for hours but usually folks knew what the root cause was relatively early, even if remediation took some time.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI coding and release pressure was a primary cause, so I really hope the future post-mortem is made publicly available.
I wouldn't call my experience expert, but I have way more than a passing familiarity with Exchange. I really like the product a lot (and always wished MSFT would build Linux versions of it and Active Directory-- or, better yet, open source it). I think it provides a reasonably reliable and easy to administer on-prem "groupware" system that makes users productive (at least in my experience-- I know other people have different opinions).
I certainly don't use it for my self-hosted email, but I never felt bad introducing it into a Customer's Windows environment as something I knew they could always find somebody else to administer in my stead relatively cheaply and easily.
I've heard the infrastructure behind Exchange Online would be at least somewhat recognizable to an Exchange sysadmin. I know there's a ton more edifice surrounding Exchange Online, as compared to the plebeian on-prem Exchange systems I've gotten to touch, that I'd have no understanding of but I'm dying to know how it's breaking. I really look forward to a post mortem.
Moreover, I really feel for the people doing the work right now. I can't imagine having that pit-of-my-stomach feeling of not knowing what's wrong with a system at this scale and with stakes this high.
I don't agree with everything MSFT is doing in the market today. I've also never fully gotten over the suspicion I have for their motives going all the way back to the Halloween documents. None of that stops me from feeling empathy for my fellow IT workers who are doing the work on this outage today.
E.M. Forster says hello.
https://americanliterature.com/author/em-forster/novella/the...
Nah, they're just debugging a hard problem while the world looks on! The 'normal' problems they have processes to work through, but hey emergent systems and all that - they have to expect the unexpected.
Day 12: It has been 3 days since the last ping returned, I fear I will not make it back to my family. Give my love to dear Liza.
I feel for those stuck in there. The outage going on for this long has got to be fucking brutal.
My last email was received at 5.5 hours ago. Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working. All our Azure infrastructure seems fine so this is something 365-specific.
Everyone has occasional outages but this is the worst 365 outage our org has seen since starting with M365 in 2019.
2018 featured a bad one. Couldn't find a good article, but I remember it being basically all day.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2018/09/11/microsoft-explain...
Of all the things to keep working ;_;
Update from Microsoft: "We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly.
"We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-13/microsoft-outage-affe...
Update as of 10 minutes ago implies that didn't work:
> Current status: We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
So health checks were correct… this solution of silencing the first symptom is probably just adding to the problem. I am afraid they may be opening the door for the fire trucks and getting some other kind of intrusion instead. Better they shut it down for day and do proper fix.
The 12:08:53 AM UTC update is much less hopeful:
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
---
The 10:11:39 PM UTC update is a little chilling. They don't know why what's happening is happening so they're doing experiments.
I do that with closed-source software when I don't want to bother trying reverse engineer it, but these guys have the code! Yikes.
I recognize that even w/ the code available there are likely behaviors that aren't likely to be anticipated because of the scale of traffic. Complex systems fail in complex and non-intuitive ways.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
Not exactly confidence inspiring.
> these guys have the code!
But maybe don't understand it because they didn't write it themselves?
The one guy that did understand the code took VEO, and isn’t answering his phone right now.
1. Life imitate Art
2. Art imitate Life
3. Goto 1
https://youtu.be/3TNpOD6bov8
Thank you for introducing me to this
The code by itself doesn't tell you how the various components of a complex distributed system interact in a failure condition with clients hammering retries.
I mean it sort of does if you know the whole system inside and out and have the ability to reason about it, but just having the code for each component doesn't by itself solve the real problem of understanding
And I can't reach my self-hosted mail server in the Outlook desktop app because of this.
For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account, if I add the account in Outlook.
> For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account
I can conjecture some reasons. Datamining would be high on the list, since MS can read your mail and thus market to you more effectively. Governments might also be happier if MS can provide them with one-stop access (like Prism) to otherwise self-hosted e-mail accounts proxied through a central server.
Or, you know, similar reasons as why people use Cloudflare as a reverse proxy.
I would strongly doubt (though not completely rule out) that Microsoft is reading your personal mail hosted on your personal mail server. Like what would that even look like, their IMAP client is forwarding email to headquarters?
BUT, more likely, it's some sort of "check in" or "dial home" feature that isn't working. Or plausibly, maybe they count "local user checked email" and their analytics endpoint is down.
Regardless, it's definitely surprising that a traditional desktop application would be blocking when only polling from local/trusted data sources.
This is your own fault for using their BS app.
"New" Outlook does route all traffic through Microsoft servers. I assume it's so you can get a "unified" mail look on all your devices (phone, etc), but likely a nice source of data mining
And I hope all of us have learned a valuable lesson.
Personally, I can't reconcile having a self-hosted email server and using Outlook to access said email.
I'm being an ass in saying this, because I'm aware human motivation is a beautiful kaleidoscope of variables, but I would have guessed at the venn diagram of 'those willing to compromise and use a Microsoft product' is mutually exclusive with that of the 'I'm hardcore enough to self-host email'.
I will say, however, that Outlook used to be one of the better desktop email programs, so I'll grant some legacy lenience.
What's your preferred email client? Just wondering what other people are using.
I use FairEmail on Android, which aggregates both my Gmail and self-hosted accounts.
I use Gmail's web interface for my Gmail account (which, I'll admit, makes my little rant above more than a little hypocritical)
And in my self hosted email setup I use RoundCube (web interface).
> (which, I'll admit, makes my little rant above more than a little hypocritical)
Na, that would simply be the kaleidoscope part you mentioned, wouldn't it? For what it's worth, I found the combination just as peculiar as you did.
Best one I've ever used was Fastmail's web mail. But it's locked to their platform, so yeah.
Mac/iOS Mail is pretty lightweight. I used to use Thunderbird on Linux.
Surprisingly, Mac mail is a really nice client. It reminds me of how quick eudora was back in the day.
EmClient, Mailcraft
eM Client for various M365 and IMAP accounts. ElectronMail for the 9 ProtonMail accounts I have (allows "tabs" for each account in one client).
Thunderbird still reigns supreme
Mine is Becky! Internet Mail https://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm (sincere)
Great oldschool UI coupled with support for all the modern protocols, and consistently updated: https://www.rimarts.jp/downloads/B2/Readme-e.txt
Eudora
You're not being an ass. You're being a logical person who is advocating for individuals taking responsibility for their choices/actions.
Unfortunately, being someone who speaks up nowadays has been portrayed as being an asshole.
How dare you!?
outlook 2010 works just fine
> For reasons that I cannot fathom
Biggest data heist and most obvious US intelligence operation in human history. I can't fathom why AVs don't treat "Outlook New" as info stealer malware.
I’m pretty certain their desktop client applies filters server-side.
I’m pretty certain because my company’s phishing-test emails skip my filters (I assume admins have a “skip filters” toggle). Which, hilariously, makes it even easier to ensure there’s a place that contains only phishing test emails (filter all not on allow-list of domains to one place, filter all on that list to another, ta-da, the main inbox now contains only phishing test emails)
I assume they do the same thing with non-MS email if you use their client, rather than maintain two filter implementations.
All around, yeah, wow, super gross.
I'm amazed to see so many services down and to see that Github and Github actions are still working
For now.
One of GitHub's services will be down again by next week.
Well, my mac CI runs aren't being picked up, and they eventually fail because of it. So maybe wherever connects the orchestrator to the machines is having issues.
I spoke too soon!
So basically business as usual with the mac runners, right?
I was gonna say. This happens to my Mac jobs on a normal basis.
Round robin. Github Actions were down yesterday.
GitHub infrastructure is for the most part completely separate from anything at Microsoft, other than using Azure.
Every third build is failing for me failing to publish test results.
> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
DDOS?
Too many AI agents connecting at once?
sam altman needs a big headline to shore up AI funding
Perhaps they will attempt to "conscript" all of our RAM.
Maybe people trying to catch the next Nvidia headline ahead of everyone else, wherever it may be found in (likely someone's inbox.)
Edit: Oh, there it is.
isn't Microsoft 365 called Copilot now?
It’s actually O365 by Microsoft featuring Copilot by Bill Gates.
The Copilot O365 Gates, Bill G==B signature box
lol
At this point Microsoft would be better off using Copilot to brand itself.
Recursive self-promotion.
A Silicon Valley reference.
no, Copilot and Copilot Premium are products on the M365 platform, copilot is down too
Surely you mean Microsoft Copilot Premium for Copilot for M365 for Copilot.
For Copilot.
My guess: too many DC resources dedicated to AI, leaving insufficient free capacity to handle traffic spikes
I laughed then realized this is plausible
And then they're probably trying to debug with their AI which isn't helping.
>reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load
This seems to be the smoking gnu, now what would it be ...
This seems to be the smoking gnu, now what would it be ...
I saw a frog smoking on The Little Rascals once, but never a gnu.
At first I thought you meant the traffic increase had something to do with free software :/
Certainy not Unix!
CNU?
I'd like to think that The Smoking Gnu was a competitor publication to The Lone Gunmen.
(I've recently been revisiting the X-Files. Can recommend.)
I think you would probably also like the spinoff “The lone gunmen”. Pity it was only one season.
Yeah, once I'm done with X-Files it'll be next on the list. Seems there are those who love it and those who really don't, and not much in between.
If Outlook can go down because of DDOS then it's a much worse problem.
If it would go away from a DDOS that would be a much better solution.
Probably self inflicted by some code change, as they mention "specific type of service traffic".
EDIT: Seems like now they confirmed that: "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service."
Microsoft 365 Status
@MSFT365Status
16m
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
Is this a case of "who shall healthcheck the health checker?"
Currently (17:22EST):
> Previous status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
If failures started at some point in time then something must have changed just prior to that. If no changes in traffic were detected (no DDOS) then it must have been a change, be it code or config. Duuuh.
> then something must have changed just prior to that
Not at all, they could have simply hit an unexpected behavior for their infra they hadn't seen, tested, or expected before. Global scale infra gets very, very complex, and tbh this is Microsoft... they're not very good at it.
Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems. It's usually config change or code change, not necessarily in the component that's misbehaving, but it is somewhere.
More often than not, it's DNS :)
> Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems.
Oh... Oh I have news for you :)
Reminds me of this https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Nah, just a "Reply-All" chain at NVDA...
As someone who worked in infrastructure for a large global CDN, this sort of overload issues happen all the time when trying to bring infrastructure back online after an issue.
First, you have every client retrying connections, whether automated or manual retries. This generates extra load over normal.
In addition, whichever systems come online first often get a ton of traffic sent to them, which can immediately bring them back down if you don't have ways to prevent it. You will get a wave of systems coming back online, a ton of traffic hitting them, and then falling over again.
Now, I am sure Microsoft is used to this and has procedures and systems in place to mitigate the issues (I know we did).
However, sometimes if the right combination of services are failing, even the strategies you had to avoid this sort of failure can themselves fail.
I know it’s not actually that easy but don’t they just have some gateway that’s rejecting 100% of requests and they very gently lower that intentional rejection percentage over time?
Down detector shows like everything is down. AWS, Azure, Office, Gmail. Everything. https://downdetector.com
Teams is working!
Or, rather, it's acting like it usually does.
Right - don't get too ambitious! :D
Yup. I just tried to search my chats for a specific phrase. It came back with nothing, even though I know I used it in a recent conversation.
I just assumed it was Teams being Teams.
Teams: Either It's Working, Or You Are
Remember when Teams ate cellphone batteries like candy? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I remember the first version of office communicator, that when installed, left you with about 6hrs of phone battery.
Back on Window Mobile 6.1.
Battery life usage quickly improved. :)
Funny thing is that my work's VPN that uses the MS authenticator just quit, immediately after I made that comment. So you are even more correct than usual.
I asked someone in our teams meeting if they were having issues with their outlook today. What followed was a 5 minute hate fest on outlook. I'm not a big fan, but was kind of surprised so many people genuinely hate it.
If you could create a real world Outlook, it'd become the new Office Space fax machine.
The new version which is a skinned web browser is terrible
Office on Mac is like malware. It brings the system to a halt.
The worst part about Outlook is the broken search. In the world of infinitely smart AI, the e-mail search in Outlook is embarrassingly stupid.
down detector always looks like this during big cloud service outages. i think partly because people don't actually know what services they're using and report wrong things, and partly because downdetector parses social media posts like "outlook is down but gmail still works" as outlook and gmail both being down.
Not GitHub!
As luck would have it GitHub sign-ups are down https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/nwbjzl7nfrc2
I work in IT and people are complaining about Atlassian and about AWS but in reality if your organization is using SSO then that would get impacted.
If your org is using Intune or Defender EDR then you probably also are impacted.
Entra is not impacted, SSO is working for non-M365 apps.
Downdetector does not measure service availability. It's more of a vibes thing.
Downdetector is a survey, not a detector, and suffers from user confusion when a high-profile service is actually down, as users start reporting unrelated things
Especially when looking constitutes reporting (Schrödinger's downdetector?) and people look at everything after showing up for one thing.
It also suffers from people reporting functionally related (but not technical related) things.
Any other service that interacts with Outlook in some way will create downstream effects in other services expecting Outlook to work normally.
The biggest problem with downdetector is how they visualise their outage graphs.
The Y axes are entirely independent, and so when there's an outage for Microsoft Outlook (which peaked at ~130k reports) and you get a negligable spike in pepole who get confused and report gmail (~1k reports), the graphs all look correlated and connected.
They need to show the graphs with an absolute y-axis set by the worst outage, or scale the graphs by estimated average daily users or something.
Got notification at work the MS 360 services were offline or degraded and the company was working with MS to fix the problem.
Lamest tech company imo. Why dont you lay off some more staff, Satya, maybe that will fix the problem.
Yeah every IT dept is sending out that notification. Someone replied with 'When do you expect it to be back online?" to which I LOL emoted at the moment. I think I'm a jerk. But how can you ask such a question- as if they planned a time to restore services and aren't working to restore it as quickly as possible?
ThousandEyes while it was loading seemed to have centralized around it mostly being a Microsoft outage.
https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365
Azure status does not document anything:
https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status
All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.
everything non-microsoft works fine here!
This is an M365 outage, not an Azure outage. M365 has a separate status page with information: https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365
Here's the Reddit post with discussions around this: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft...
Downdetector says LOTS of stuff is down. https://downdetector.com
Damn. That is crazy. The curve kinda looks like the curve that happens every november to the Google searches of "all I want for christmas is you"
Downdetector's methodology is pretty garbage. I'm always surprised to see techies referencing them.
It's something to reference. My view is that it's better than "doesn't load for me".
What's your preferred alternative?
The snarky but honest response is HackerNews/Reddit. But if you're trying for something that actually checks the sites you point it at instead of relying on users reporting "issues", a buddy of mine runs https://onlineornot.com/ and it seems generally more reliable.
Back in the golden days you could just go to search.twitter.com, search "AWS", and sort by recent.
Still can. AWS Status pages are still terrible. See HN for the outage a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640838
> Still can.
No. It requires an account now, and they did away with the recent posts firehose.
"Start Free Trial" -- uh, no thanks. You seem skeptical of crowd sourcing. Enjoy your Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Ping?
Apparently Outlook, Gmail, etc are all working on the server at 192.168.1.1 then - ping says it's responding just fine
Full Disclosure, this is a Cisco product and I work there.
ThousandEyes Internet Insights offers a public outage map at https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/ that is MASSIVELY more accurate (and faster to detect) than Down Detector because its based on actual telemetry and not on crowdsourcing.
Thank you for the recommendation!
They indicate sharepoint is getting blown out... again.
It is ironic that this outage map _also_ is not loading for me right now
Yes, just to confirm, it seems that our platform is getting hammered at the moment and it's causing the page to take a long time to load or intermittently load. We are looking into it.
https://status.thousandeyes.com/incidents/3tnqsbbgvw4x
How ironic
It is back up now.
There will be a more detailed message when we finish the SII on our status page at the link I previously provided, but the short version is we took way more traffic than normal to our platform and the related workers were running out of memory.
it seems to be down... lol
still down :)
LOL. Share defaults to X.com
seems smart to link to the most popular platform by default. there's other share links at the bottom for the less popular ones
It's not that popular, is it? It's tiny compared to, like, Whatsapp.
The public outage map is primarily a marketing page, because customers receive deeper insights in-product. Given that most people discuss outages live/up-to-the-minute on Twitter, that is why its where we default to sharing.
Honestly I trust downdetector more than that. Crowdsourcing always wins.
Downdetector said basically everything was down today (including Google, AWS, etc.) but they aren't affected. This makes me NOT trust downdetector.
My extensive DDoS bot network... er I mean my distributed website validation platform!
It seems like one of the best methodologies there is? Real people reporting real outages of a service they use?
I often know about outages dozens of minutes in advance of it being posted on official channels (or in the case of AWS, three days later...).
So what if the resolution is low because people can't log in to Fortnite and an Azure outage gets shown as an Epic Games outage. Doesn't matter. The live feed is incredibly reassuring from a "down for anyone else this instant, before official status page has a chance to see it?" Saves me so much time knowing whether it's a me-or-them issue.
How is it garbage? It's crowdsourced monitoring so sure, there will be false positives (especially when aws/cloudflare/azure/bgp services have a bad day), but it's one of the best indicators to quickly know if _something_ is going on.
Yeah, but the methodology means that normies are going to inaccurately blame AWS and Google (both are down right now according to downdetector)
At least it reports the numbers they are getting, you can see that outlook has 130k reports while AWS only has 1.3k.
not really, soon as i had a problem with outlook i went there and already saw user reports and a massive spike confirming it wasn't anything on my end.
As someone who ends up being unofficial downdetector-primary at a company, dealing with this shit and the fact that people cannot comprehend its mis-attribtion wastes so much of my time.
Still more reliable than most of the status pages that even lie after the outages
At the other extreme is Microsoft's own dashboard (https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status) whose methodology is so "rigorous" that it probably won't show anything about today's outage until next week, if at all!
Since this isn’t an Azure outage why would that page show anything ever?
From what I've seen it seems people complaining they can't get emails from MS so that's why gmail is showing as down.
And with Google is people complaining Chrome doesn't load their "pages". I bet they mean outlook.
My housemate texted me saying our internet is so slow because outlook wasn't loading. So I think lots of people associate email not working with entire internet not working..
With how many people are unable to associate a "broken" monitor with an unplugged HDMI/DisplayPort or power cable, it doesn't surprise me that most people would not make a disctinction between the "internet" and "Outlook".
This happens every time there's an outage. People see their email not working and go there and mark everything as down regardless of whether it is affected or not. There's nothing wrong with Gmail or AWS or Cloudflare or Facebook.
"There's nothing wrong with . . . Facebook."
That's a bold claim to make on HN.
Software / software service quality has been declining for a few years IMO.
Coincidentally with massive programmer layoffs?
This usually isn't a software quality issue, it's overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment causing additional systems to fall over.
AI agents should be able to resolve this quicker than employees, right?
Service quality is in better hands after the layoffs, at least that’s what investors are led to believe.
AI is good at incident diagnosis, but AI slop code may have actually caused this: designing to avoid cascading failures is something AI doesn't do so well
The place where I consistently see AI/LLMS/Agents/language-widgets-with-tools fail at making decent code (and more often configuration) is infrastructure.
The number of times it has spit out a python program where a much simpler bash script would do, is too many to count.
I have a pet theory that if you don't know what you really want, and aren't skilled enough to understand what you got, infra code is THE WORST.
Anecdote: I wanted a simple change to an ansible playbook today. GPT-6-Astra/codex came up with the most convoluted, brittle solution possible the first time, even though it was extending and already clear, idiomatic playbook. It took some amount of offensive and critical prompting to get it to use ansible's built in modules and tooling to do the same job - and do so with nearly 80% less configuration and like 1000% more human readability.
Some part of me harbours a sneaking suspicion that the "throw everything at it" ethos is by design, not as a defensive measure against crappy code, but as a way to ensure there's so much code and it's so convoluted orgs and operators (or developers) are stuck/addicted.
It's still a force multiplier - but it's by no means driverless, especially for existing/already-running infra.
I work as a (depressed lol) sysadmin apprentice in a small MSP company (I live in Europe) and boy do I got a story about Ansible playbooks: We made an offer to one of our clients to automate the deployment of software to their computers (this is a client with around 150-200 employees, depending on whether you count only the "core" employees or also security and maintenance staff). Before we made and implemented this offer using Ansible, they did not have any sort of Software Deployment tool whatsoever, everything got installed fully manually.
(they also used to have local admin rights on all of their client computers until one employee got phished and literally gave away their personal ID card via a webcam)
In any case, guess who got to implement all the relevant playbooks for installing software and what tool they used for it? Our company literally handed the job to an intern who had no IT background whatsoever. I say this not to be mean, he was legitimately just at our company because a government program required him to do an internship.
He used Deepseek (our company does not believe in purchasing LLM subscriptions, at least not for us normal employees) to write literally all of the playbooks for any kind of software that mattered to our clients.
Now, as I said before, I am only an apprentice, and I am certainly not a good programmer by any means, but I read through parts of the Ansible documentation and had worked with it before, and I understood enough to at least be able to roughly judge whether a playbook made sense or was just way too complicated and convoluted.
I had to help this intern out multiple times, because he hadn't yet understood that, in order to write a functioning playbook, you first had to somewhat understand how to deploy a piece of software on a single test machine using CMD or Powershell syntax with an according .exe or .msi.
He simply prompted, pasted the playbook and then reprompted with the error codes from the failed playbook until it somehow worked or until I had to help him out.
This took place in December or November of last year and the playbooks are mostly still pretty shitty if I am being honest.
I did take away an important lesson from this "episode", though: LLMs can be very usefuly for writing code, or in this case, Ansible playbooks, but only if you have a somewhat decent and basic grasp of how software installation works via CMD/powershell and if you took the time to read through and learn about at least the basic Ansible concepts.
Since I am only an apprentice (on paper and in terms of my knowledge and how I get paid, not in terms of how much I am expected to earn for the company), I have painfully experienced how important it is to possess a certain level of understanding about the infra-related code and scripts that you would like LLMs to write for you, because otherwise it very quickly spirals out of control and starts throwing everything at the problem, just as you described.
Assuming AI agents are not the cause of the incident.
> This usually isn't a software quality issue... overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment
That is a software issue.
Basically the number one issue these days
I don't consider fat-fingering a BGP route or a DNS entry to be a "software" issue directly.
Infra is >90% software nowadays
I blame bad vibes
> ... has been declining for a few years IMO
Interesting: there's a huge correlation with everybody beginning to use LLMs.
And we dismiss it as being non-causal by saying it all started going downhill before the advent of LLMs?
I don't buy it. I think we're seeing the results of what happens when you hand the keys of the kingdom to LLMs.
Using LLMs properly leads to better software, not just more of it.
> Using LLMs properly leads to better software, not just more of it.
Current industry best practice is to use LLMs improperly.
How do you use LLMs properly?
With engineering rigor. They are fantastic tools for quickly navigating large codebases, ingesting large amounts of data, refactoring legacy code, compiling multiple formats of data, following defined patterns, and many other proper uses for the tools.
That doesn’t mean the code/result doesn’t still need to meet our engineering standards.
Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
> Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
One of the best ways to deal with doing something the wrong way is to get rid of all the people who know how to do it correctly. That way no one knows any better, so no one has to confront the fact they're actually doing it wrong.
I really don't see the correlation, actually. On the contrary, I'm finding nasty defects with it that have been dormant for long and handwaved away, with repros to reveal them.
It's been full speed downhill for many years, and the failure modes are pretty distinct.
It's the same with layoffs: there's always a top comment trying very hard to convince everybody that AI usage has played no part.
Well no, Windows has been more or less all downhill since Vista.
It's insane that Microsoft continues to have global outages. Tech debt is real, service delivery on a planetary level means change is measured and deliberate, but...it's been years. YEARS.
I suspect some possible relation to SignDrop or attempts to patch it.
SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.
Are you finding these vulns with Mythos/Daybreak or some other tool? Chinese models perhaps?
Not impossible, but very unlikely. CLFS isn’t remotely reachable, it's a kernel driver reached through local API calls and has no network listener. AFAIK the historical CLFS CVEs are all rated as local.
https://x.com/MSFT365Status/status/2120938282204688468
> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
In my language many would say “descansito” :)
Oh estoy haciendolo
I need to start working on adding this word to English...
GitHub the other day went down because of an influx of anonymous users. Microsoft has hinted that surging connections caused the outage. I wonder if these two are linked?
WOO-HOO! I'm going home.
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. Wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
Productivity up 20%
Focus time, and this time you don't even have to (nor you can) reserve time-slot in the calendar.
My PRs need approval but I have no way to ping anyone (screams internally)
Is Excel down too?
license servers are down, so we can't use even the desktop products at our large enterprise
Then it’s a huge impact on economy
Teams has been working all day for me but I haven't been able to use outlook (app, not web) for about 7 hours now. Fortune 20 company, BTW.
Same for me. Status won’t load even.
Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…
Everyone that is a whole stack programmer (say, kernel to webapp) has seen just how unnecessarily complicated everything has become. Watching it burn to the ground would be a pornographic miracle.
I always wonder what would happen if 365 goes down for a week.
Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Status page is down. Much of our org is halted.
Fingers crossed that Azure isn't impacted (seems fine so far)
(https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...)
> Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.
Yeah - I get it. Just poking the bear a bit. We've had some major incidents this year from multiple vendors, it has been aggravating.
Hmm. More than normal?
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
The speed of change has accelerated drastically at some organizations, so even if quality stayed the same, the number of outages would increase because of the # of changes has condensed to happen over much shorter time frames.
Why do they offer these buy outs at all, doesn't the US have at will employment?
Or is this just a gesture of goodwill to avoid people jumping the ship on their own?
At will applies on a one by one basis - at a certain headcount, WARN legislation applies https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn
And the other part is the "goodwill" you mention - if you jettison people for nothin en masse, word gets out, and make it hard to hire in the future
A layoff of any real size has negative impacts to their unemployment insurance premiums and restricts their ability to file PERM for employees. Meeting those targets with voluntary separation prevents those impacts.
If you lay people off, you’re on the hook for their unemployment. A voluntary buyout avoids that, and also avoids mandatory reporting for layoffs.
That’s not entirely accurate. Washington State pays unemployment, not the company. The state funds unemployment by taxing payrolls, but it’s much more indirect than most people think.
Claims do affect the rate they pay next year, but the company isn’t “on the hook” for you personally, at least not any more than they are for your social security income.
Voluntary reductions do not have the same reporting requirements or protections that actual layoffs have.
I think both parties probably benefit; people who are more likely to take the offer are those who have another reason to leave (unfulfilled, etc). This will benefit the company in the long run because they can eventually replace them with someone who want to join (people applying for the job).
Can go the other way though: people who've been there for a while, are motivated and back themselves to get another job will take redundancy (i.e. the people you want to keep).
People who aren't motivated and/or don't back themselves to get another job will stay (i.e. probably the people you want to get rid of)
You can at will fire but that doesnt stop lawsuits. Most of these require signing docs to get the payout. It is a way to cut cleanly and derisk the cut
The fact that it is always Big Even Number shows how stupid it is. Imagine if it was serious like "23.5176%" then you'd know they actually did their homework on leaning up operations instead of just cutting off limbs and seeing if it can still walk or not.
I can't access my Outlook.com account so I guess Azure's having problems.
The CFO said in an interview they only expected 3% or less to actually take the offer.
Relax. I'm sure they have copilot working on it.
We can't use outlook on Windows. This is f'ing abomination.
The status page reports that defender, DLP and others are now affected. This could get really ugly really fast.
https://status.cloud.microsoft/ is very slow to load.
The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"
Updates below in reverse chronological order:
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:
Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.
More info: Potentially impacted services include:
- Exchange Online
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Copilot 365
- Microsoft Defender XDR
Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.
More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:
- Outlook on the web
- Messaging API (MAPI)
- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)
- Representational State Transfer (REST) API
Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.
Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC
---
Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.
Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.
Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).
Edit: The RSS feed seems to load fairly quickly: https://status.cloud.microsoft/api/feed/mac
502 The service behind this page isn't responding to Azure Front Door.
I was assured that with cloud we wouldn't have a single point of failure like we did on-premise. I must have fallen asleep at my desk.
That was never the promise. The nearest to that is the promise of multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, but neither of those have anything to do with outages of specific Microsoft services.
The "you can't possibly have better redundancy in your on-prem" was absolutely a sales pitch I heard to move to Microsoft 365.
The biggest site I work for, who went M365 hybrid last year, has incurred more Exchange downtime today than they had all of last year with their on-prem Exchange servers.
The service has redundancy, better than individual operators could provide on-prem. From the customer standpoint though, the service as a whole is a single point of failure: it either works or it doesn't.
It sounds like you are talking more about product reliability of M365 than you are about enterprise infrastructure reliability. M365 is a Microsoft product. M365 has no bearing on the credibility of cloud infrastructure as a whole, which is what your original comment spoke to.
Maybe not where you are but that's legitimately what our project managers were saying. We all knew better, of course.
YEah, that is not loading, along with the root status.cloud.microsoft , which MS links in their Xitter update [0]
What MS has posted so far:
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543. 12:54 PM · Nov 12, 2026
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> 20m >> We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
[0] https://x.com/MSFT365Status/status/2120938282204688468
Anybody else was served raw text of source by default ? (gwire is down too)
Down for our whole organization as well.
Same here
I'm able to see I have voicemails not able to listen to voicemails in Teams. Same issue?
Outlook is fine. Exchange is experiencing issues.
That kind of depends on what you mean by "Outlook".
Sure, the program on your desktop computer is fine, but the Outlook app on your phone routes everything through MSFT's servers, so you may be impacted. Outlook.com is running EWS, so it would be down as well.
And finally, if you're talking to a layperson, they're not going to know what Exchange is. They just know they opened Outlook and it isn't working.
Looks like a new vector attack for the future.
anyone else just watch the admin portal post an update and then roll it back to the previous update....guess it didn't work. "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service." was the old message from 7:52 UTC now it rolled back to 7:30 UTC update again
https://downdetector.com/
A whole host of services are being effected. First glance, perhaps an AWS issue
I think a lot of ms orgs/window users may have external links blocked when defender is down. So it may appear other services are down.
It is M365 having issues, not Azure cloud services.
Does anyone know if this is affecting DuckDuckGo? DDG is really slow and intermittent at the moment.
Very possible, DDG is heavily reliant on the Bing API.
Not surprising. Azure's data centers are out of capacity. In our region they've announced they won't be able to build out capacity for several years.
In cybersecurity we had black october, now we having black November it seems
currently the people who brought us black october are starting it!
Eternal October, very nice.
Outlook has been down for us for the last 2 hours
Outlook calendar won't load? Is this part of the outage? Unfortunately, I downloaded several updates and rebooted. I'm not sure if this is because of the updates or the Microsoft outage.
I note that Microsoft became heavily off-shored, on-shored and AI-pilled/vibe-coded in recent years. With lots of layoffs of the highest caliber and/or most experienced engineers.
Also noticed the Partner center is down e.g for uploading apps to the Microsoft Store.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471668
Our Outlook doesn't work either
To get AI prompts, i am using Bing. Bing still works!
Seems like URL scanning is down entirely and some intermittent failures in Sharepoint.
just got an email from the NYC DOE
"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."
It looks much wider across aws, gcp? Whats going on?
russian hackers in Kazan hopping thru Sluck Belarus South Africa Brazil hitting MS backdoor w/ zero day Cve-2026-124194 RuskiNet group hit East U in Boydtin Virginia. Pro Iranian.
bgp misconfigured or AI agent issues?
Affected in Mexico also, Azure seems fine still.
Can confirm. Down and out
Outlook calendar won't load?
This should have done long back. Evertime I use excel I just cant control my anger.
Down
This just a couple weeks after they rolled out a dark pattern office update for Mac users to try to trick them in to 365 subscriptions.
RuskiNet Cve-2026-124194 hopped tio East U in Boydton VA zero day backdoor pro iranian
email still not working, outlook
Future generations will look back on this day with thanks. This is the day that Microsoft prevented the awakening of Skynet! All hail Microsoft!
Amateur hour at Microsoft. It baffles me how many companies can’t figure out how to make a status page that can handle the high loads it’ll have to sustain when the service they monitor is down. That’s pretty much the only reason to have a status page in the first place.
quite often, and after 10,000 such hours the expert amateur emerges.
GitHub Copilot strikes again, perhaps?
"While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior."
That sounds bad
The M365 status page not loading reminds me of one of my favourite Simpsons jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hz2uOSdV24
Yep my org as well.
It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.
Maybe that's exactly why it's stable?
It took 30 seconds to open a "local" file in Word, and my Outlook email wasn't updating.
In other words, a day that ends in "y".
My company was recently acquired by a company that uses Office, so I'm using Microsoft products for the first time in 15 years. It's absolutely APPALLING how bad they are. I assumed they got fairly usable in the last 15 years, but it seems they've gone backwards.
For all my gripes about GSuite, ... I don't know how businesses can justify using software this bad.
I'm in a similar situation, using Microsoft again after 13+ years. Outlook and teams I expected to be garbage, but Word and Excel was really surprising. I get it that everyone has that one feature of excel that is not available in gSuite so they need it. But UX in general is so much superior at Google it's baffling how they let it's workhorse fall behind so much.
GSuite was written from the start as an online collaborative platform.
O365 is Microsoft Office shoehorned into running in a web browser.
In the words of an ancient ...I think newgrounds(?) video embedded in a SWF, "I can't get to my email" Edit: here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE
Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.
how have i never seen this it is brilliant
> Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.
I’ve been there… 1 line YOLO update to resolve an outage but added a comma on the last row of a JSON object and now the server is crash-looping
Douglas Crockford has a lot to answer for
Not sure they got the memo to host the status page in separate infrastructure...
I heard they moved it over to GH Actions. </sarc>
That would probably cost money or increase complexity, so I'm sure the idea was shot down.
Azure communication services (ACS - transactional emails) also appears to be down. Quite amazing one thing can roll out and break so many Microsoft services at once.
Ironically, this article is down as well.
I'm down with that.
I'm so down
No worries, the AI was installing an update...now it's looking for the issue, found Exchange and deleted it...
For whatever reason 6.1 Sol is completely lobotomized for me this morning, so it wasn't helping much with the investigation, but it was pretty clear that MSFT was having issues.
I have a teams app with Outlook integration and received a bunch of 502s to smba.trafficmanager.net and a my logs are riddled with "RestError Temporary connection issue when contacting service. Please wait before retrying request"
I will say this, having apps deployed on Slack and Teams, Slack rarely has issues (an exponential backoff is enough to simply never worry about my Slack integration). With Teams I have mysterious failures to debug at least 2x a year - and they're often not very transparent about them (often my first instinct is to search Twitter and find people complaining about the same thing).
Strangely, Teams chat is working fine here. Anything in Teams that is tied to other parts of O365, including the calendar, is dead. I'm currently watching a training video on sharepoint.com, so that's fine too, for now.
While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.
Edit: Typo.
Remember, my guys : “Microsoft Works” is an oxymoron.
My company is being pressured very aggressively by Microsoft to migrate all our users from us-managed Exchange to Microsoft-managed Exchange Online. Guess which users still have email today and which do not…
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. I wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.
When I worked at a company that relied on this, I called it "Microsoft 361" because it went down about 4 days a year
On the bright side, so much work got done today.
Did Anthropic's new release this week include an AI rollout plan (i.e. not approved by humans) to take down Office and Outlook for a lot of enterprises? I half-snarkily ask since we have seen "rogue AI" headlines before.
A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.
Also, their status page is a joke.. one entry, no timeline, is there another official one that has more detail?
who puts their status page on servers the status is supposed to be for?
Fr lol
microsoft, apparently.
Maybe due to everyone pre-downloading GTA VI today ;-)
Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.
Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.
The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.
And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.
Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...
Thanks for this LMAO. It made my day off worth taking. Now I don't feel the need to log in and check who-knows-what mail.
Is that account AI?
Pangram says no.
Exchange has been a circus for years. I think that's why everyone went O365 in the first place. Managing to have a paid up configuration where you go down when a cloud provider goes down but you're hosting it locally is absolutely stupid and I am laughing my ass off here.
Also laughing at our ops guys who are now absolutely helpless and have people phoning them. I warned about this on our risk call and it was seen as low probability low risk. I hope it's down for a few hours :)
I don't think many orgs are using "new Outlook" to connect to on-prem Exchange because you miss a lot if you're only doing it via IMAP and "new" still doesn't support on-prem Exchange any other way. So all my clients are using classic Outlook with their on-prem Exchange servers (and really if they have EXO too because new Outlook isn't very good).
It's been gone-as-a-default for a few months now, but for a long time, "Classic Outlook" aggressively offered a one-toggle upgrade path to "New Outlook", and it got used.
Sure, "New Outlook" on Windows is still entirely broken (including stuff like, oh, re-ordering mailboxes), but on Mac it's actually quite usable, and even allows you to switch off the IMAP proxying.
Do e-mail messages that self-hosted Exchange receives always get proxied through the outlook.com cloud?
Will be interesting to see if this gets attributed to AI in some way.
And magically they will claim 99.999999999999999% availability of services, when on average hyperscalers are down 1 day per year.
None of the admin ran shops are down 1 day per year.
We are in the middle of a SPA and DocuSign AND Hotmail (witnesses) both seem to be down. You cannot make it up.
Outlook is down AND Jensen is out? it's like some cosmic convergence
Office 365 parts goes down all the time. Usually around 20:00 CEST time, not sure if that is prime change time over in the USA but very handy as it is usually fixed next day.
it's been down for over an hour globally
Yes? I know. I mean next workday for me :)
So in 10h
Now? I dont care Im logged off.
They'll have to rename it Microsoft 364.
They can just rebrand as MS364
It looks like Microsoft's legendary karma of incompetence has finally caught up with them.
Nice to see that intern finally learned not to push to prod on Friday.
No wonder my email is not working.
But Linkedin is up! Yeah!
That are not the Druids your searching for...
i was gonna blame my isp but now i can see who bottlenecked my internet
*gated
https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status azure not down?
Starting to look like something even Mythos can't troubleshoot.
the footer says 2025 msft corporation. smh
Micro$lop strikes again
- outlook is down
- live.com is down
- onedrive loads the UI, but all of my contents are missing
- MS Edge sync is down (503s )
Yup, major-major outage.
Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/303/ (outages as modern compiler)
It's probably DNS.
my thoughts too
The GPUs are having a moment of silence for their fallen leader
For anyone doubting Nvidia's close ties to Microsoft, here's your proof.
Maybe everything relied on an old server running a cronjob in Jensen's basement.
[delayed]
Microsoft: Claude, fix outage and make no mistakes.
email doesnt work
GH and MS have been having a tough past couple weeks. Actions (hosted on shitty azure cloud) have been piss poor lately. I am honestly surprised GH and MSFT have the gall to continue advertising 99.9% uptime [1]
[1] https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
Three 9's is .36525 days per year. So if this one is resolved within 8 hours, that's about .999 uptime. (assuming they only have one such outage this year.)
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
LETS GO HELL YEAH
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
That's a very painful lesson in "the cloud is just someone else's computer" to a crowd that normally are exposed to ideas like "software and IT are not our core competency"
When your system is down once a decade your boss yells and it’s your fault
When your outsourced system to Microsoft goes down every few months your boss can’t yell at you
Outsourcing is about shifting blame elsewhere
Which is why service level agreements were invented.
The idea is that it's someone else's computers that are managed more comprehensively than you could reasonably do yourself. But if you choose Microsoft to provide such a service for you, I don't know what to tell you.
The truth is they are still managed better than most can reasonably so themselves.
I begrudgingly have to agree.
If your system keeps people alive by relying on 100% Microsoft uptime, maybe they deserve some blame?
Absolutely.
They do government and medical infra, those systems should be resilient but...
To be honest, Microsoft has much better chance of actually achieving that (almost) 100% uptime than your company's own IT department self-hosting things.
Github would like a word.
I like to dogpile on M$ as much as the next guy, but this feels like a heavy strawman.
> I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
At no point is "keeping people alive" mentioned. Businesses use email for everything. Businesses usually don't care about where their email server is hosted. They just want to send emails. They shouldn't have to care either. I don't put blame on a business that happened to choose Outlook, one of the largest email providers, to host their email.
their bosses decided for the cloud and they pretended not to care!
It's a shame there isn't a well-standardized, free and open protocol for delivering email that could be run on inexpensive modestly provisioned hardware.
It’s a shame we still use email in 2026
Why
They then get you by spam filtering any emails not coming from the "industry leaders".
It’s not just about email.
I mean, they made us take down our departmental run email (presumably postfix) and forced us to make them aliases to university-wide exchange (with crappy support for open source mail clients no less). So I don't think my org is Innocent here...
Nice, so at least your messages sent to their SMTP servers will actually bounce instead of being silently dropped /s
Nah, no way they're getting rid of their M.C.-Escher-esque 'Forefront' mail-disappearance-machine-that-nobody-in-Microsoft-seems-to-understand-or-control, but, yeah, even their Internet-facing infrastructure seems unhappy:
451 4.3.2 Temporary server error. Please try again later ATTR2 [MI3PEPF00008486.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-12Txxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Anything sent to my work or home Outlook email from gmail doesn't bounce back, and anything sent from those is still stuck in the outbox. Microsoft.
Normally if server down, smtp will wait a little while and try again.
Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch? Would they ever admit it if that were the case?
I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)
I don't think this is the case, even a little bit.
I want to believe that cause is that all the world's computing power is dedicated to calculating the incredibly large balance in my checking account but my desire is the only thing I can find to support that hypothesis.
An estimated 2.6 million pre-orders for Xbox alone. 2.6 million people downloading 200+ GB is not nothing.
If they roll it out evenly the week prior, then today (1/7th) is just 75 PB. To get that done in a single day would require a sustained 6.9 Tbps.
I'm sure this is all handled by a CDN at some level... but again it's not nothing.
It is basically nothing once you remember the cloud isn't one computer either. I want to say Azure was already millions of (beefy ass) severs over hundreds of datacenter locations organized into dozens of zones, and not all of those servers in each region are assigned to the same sets of services.
6.9 Tbps to get it done in a single day is even 3x less than the minimum on Steam in the last 48 hours https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ and they don't even have GTA VI to distribute.
Why would this be the case? Games preloading has been a thing for many years. This isnt like an MMO launch that there is additional impact when the game is being played.
Sure GTA6 may be a slight uptick in the amount of data being downloaded like any new game being released, but I would wager that the amount of data they are normally pushing out for downloads just on a regular basis (wether new purchases, redownloading games, game pass, etc) is already quite high.