Microsoft Expands Capacity as Outlook Disruption Continues Into Friday

Microsoft reported only marginal progress toward restoring Outlook and Exchange Online in a 06:56 UTC update Friday, November 13, and said it was adding virtual-machine capacity. Its email incident remained classified as a service degradation: affected users could still have trouble reaching mailboxes or face delayed email delivery, according to Microsoft’s incident notices carried by the University of Pennsylvania.

The distinction for employees starting Friday is that the disruption does not affect every Teams function. In a 06:54 UTC update, Microsoft said most core Teams functions—including calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages—were unaffected. Scheduling meetings, sending invitations and editing calendar entries could fail when those actions depend on Exchange.

Mail access and connected services

Microsoft’s Exchange Online incident, EX1550543, began at 16:17 UTC on November 12; its broader Microsoft 365 incident, MO1550821, began at 18:26 UTC. Both were still marked as service degradations in Friday’s updates. Microsoft listed potential problems with Outlook on the web, desktop mailbox connections and mobile synchronization. It said direct access to files in SharePoint remained functional.

The effects extend to a connected service: OpenAI reported that new connections to its Microsoft 365 connector may be broken and related tools may not work as expected. Its status page listed that issue as under investigation.

A business schedule changes

Workhorse Group said November 12 that disruption from the Microsoft outage had prompted it to postpone its third-quarter earnings release and conference call. The company rescheduled the call for November 16 at 4:30 p.m. Eastern.

Microsoft scheduled its next service-health update for 07:30 UTC November 13. Its 06:56 UTC notice did not announce a full restoration.