Microsoft Outage Hits Outlook and Teams in the UAE as First Fixes Fail to Hold
Outlook, Teams and Copilot went down for users in the UAE and around the world on Thursday night, and Microsoft says its first fixes have not worked as expected as engineers try new options.
Outlook, Teams and Copilot stopped working for users in the UAE and around the world on Thursday night, in a Microsoft 365 outage that ran through most of the US workday and was still not fully fixed on Friday morning. Microsoft says its first attempts to repair the problem have not worked as expected, and engineers are now trying alternative fixes.
The disruption began shortly before 10pm Gulf time on Thursday 12 November, when users found they could not open mailboxes, send email or join Teams calls. By Friday morning, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams were the three most reported services on Downdetector’s UAE site.
| Time (GST) | What happened |
|---|---|
| Thu 8:17pm | Microsoft’s service health record dates the Exchange Online incident from 16:17 UTC |
| Thu 9:40pm | User reports surge and Microsoft says it is investigating problems in the Americas |
| Thu 10pm | Outlook problem reports peak at more than 130,000 in the US, per Downdetector |
| Fri 1:40am | Engineers begin restarting affected servers to return them to service |
| Fri 5am | Microsoft lists more affected services, including SharePoint, Planner and Windows 365 |
| Fri morning | Microsoft reports only limited recovery, with fixes not taking as expected |
What went wrong
Microsoft traced the failure to part of its Exchange Online infrastructure, the system that handles requests from users trying to reach their mailboxes. A large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks, and the traffic they would have carried piled onto the servers still running.
The company is clear on one point. The overload was not caused by a surge in demand, and Microsoft says its investigation has found no indication of malicious activity behind the disruption.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”
Microsoft 365 Status, on X
What is affected
Email took the first hit, with Outlook users unable to open mailboxes on the web, on desktop and on mobile, and email delivery delayed. Teams calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages were also disrupted, along with Copilot, SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, To Do and Microsoft 365 for the web.
The knock-on effects reached beyond Microsoft’s own apps. OpenAI said it was investigating problems with its Microsoft connectors, and Anthropic said an upstream provider issue was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The UAE picture
In the UAE, the outage landed late on a working Thursday evening and carried into Friday morning. Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams topped Downdetector’s UAE rankings on Friday morning, with sharp spikes in complaints recorded at 8:42am.
Downdetector counted affected Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, with the impact spread across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. The UAE was caught in a global failure rather than a local one, with the same services failing in the same hours across four continents.
What to do now
Microsoft is tracking the incident under references EX1550543 and MO1550821, and its public status page carries the latest updates for admins and users. The company is also posting updates from its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
For users, there is little to do but wait and retry. Microsoft says services will return gradually as apps reconnect, and a mailbox that fails now may open on the next attempt without any change on the user’s side.
One outage, every app at once
The striking part of this outage is not that email failed, but how much failed with it. One fault in Exchange Online took down chat, meetings, files, planning and AI assistance together, because all of them lean on the same mailbox infrastructure.
That is the trade-off of a single cloud suite. It is simpler to run than a dozen separate tools, until the day the shared foundation cracks, and then there is no separate tool left standing.
We will be watching what Microsoft’s post-incident review says about why so many servers failed their health checks at once.
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