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Microsoft working on ‘alternate workstreams’ as outage fix fails to deliver expected results
Microsoft says changes intended to restore services after the November 12 outage have not delivered expected improvements.
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Microsoft has said its efforts to restore services affected by a Microsoft 365 outage are not progressing as expected. The company noted they're now exploring alternative measures to address capacity issues amid sustained traffic imbalances.
In an update posted on X on November 13, Microsoft 365 Status said it had monitored the changes introduced to improve service availability but found that they were not delivering the expected results.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected,” the company said.
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Microsoft added that it was identifying alternative workstreams to increase capacity and manage persistent traffic imbalances that continue to affect its infrastructure.
Also Read: Microsoft outage: Outlook, Copilot and Teams remain disrupted, over 200,000 user issues reported
Microsoft explores alternative recovery measures
The latest update marks a setback in Microsoft's efforts to restore normal service availability. The company had previously said it was working to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner.
It had also been monitoring the performance of those infrastructure components to establish whether the changes could be expanded more broadly.
However, the latest assessment indicates that the measures have not delivered the anticipated improvements, prompting Microsoft to explore other ways to increase capacity.
Users directed to Microsoft 365 service updates
Microsoft has asked administrators to refer to incident reference numbers EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre for further information.
The company has also shared an alternative update link for administrators who cannot access the admin centre.
Also Read: Microsoft gives initial explanation for outage; says ‘servers were unexpectedly unavailable’
Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft services disrupted
The recovery update follows a major disruption on November 12 that affected Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and other workplace applications.
Thousands of users experienced problems accessing Microsoft's services for more than five hours on Thursday. The outage also affected connectors used by artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of connectivity problems, particularly involving Exchange Online mailboxes. The company later clarified that the elevated infrastructure load was not caused by an increase in user traffic.
Instead, a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional strain on the remaining infrastructure.
The company also paused deployments while engineers worked to stabilise the affected systems.
In an earlier update, Microsoft said some restored servers were remaining stable and that it had observed limited recovery in certain regions.
Microsoft has not announced that all affected services have been fully restored.
