For Kriti, a marketing professional based in Gurugram, the workday stalled before it began. As Microsoft services went offline globally, her company’s approval pipeline for projects ground to a halt. Employees were forced to scramble, moving to alternative communication channels and requesting deadline extensions to maintain operations.
A Cascading Infrastructure Failure
The service disruption began late on November 12, affecting users across 74 countries. Microsoft reported that a core process responsible for managing secure connections on its servers became overwhelmed. According to the company, a number of servers failed automated health checks and dropped out of service. This created a cascading effect, placing excessive load on the remaining infrastructure.
The failure impacted critical tools including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs. Even administrative diagnostic tools like Intune were affected, complicating efforts by IT teams to address the issue. By the morning of November 13, Downdetector reported nearly 4,000 complaints in India, with global reports reaching 140,000.
Wide-Ranging Impact on Enterprises
The outage affected numerous large-scale enterprises that rely on the Microsoft ecosystem, including Infosys, Wipro, and several major banks such as the State Bank of India. The disruption extended to the artificial intelligence sector, with both OpenAI and Anthropic reporting issues with their Microsoft 365 connectors, illustrating the deep integration of Microsoft’s APIs into modern AI tool stacks.
As of Friday afternoon, Microsoft had not provided a confirmed timeline for full recovery, describing its progress as limited. Companies have continued to rely on secondary communication platforms like WhatsApp and Slack to manage daily workflows while awaiting service restoration.