The Employment Q&A Thread

This is unbelievable, I would think that this would be resolve in hours... I think this is a mirror image of the future with AI and risk that our kids will have to face, in case or severe outage as this.

Emails are starting to trickle in. I hope my fellow sysadmins and help desk bros were able to enjoy their downtime.

It’s been more than 10 hours since the Microsoft 365 outage began, and according to Microsoft’s 7:30 AM UTC update, recovery has been only marginal so far.

What exactly went wrong to cause such widespread disruption?
Why is recovery taking more than 10 hours?

I’m curious to hear from people working in cloud infrastructure, SRE and Microsoft 365 operations: What could be happening behind the scenes, and what might explain such a prolonged recovery?

copilot still a little slow

Is this the biggest outage ever?
More than 4-5 hours without ability to access emails.

What’s going on?

Respect to the engineers working under pressure to get things back on track. Hope they get through this soon.

Do you think AI could be contributing to these incidents? Like putting pressure on Infrastructure.

Curious to know your thoughts. Also, drop some internal info if you have anything on the ongoing incident which isn't out on the internet yet.

Affecting across multiple 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

- Microsoft Planner

- Microsoft To Do

- Microsoft Intune

- Microsoft Defender for Office 365

- Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, Auto Labelling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Communication Compliance, and Data Classification are impacted.

- Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.

- Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory.

- Universal Print: Users may encounter errors submitting print jobs or using admin features.

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.

Previous 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.

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.

Next update by: Friday, November 13, 2026, at 12:30 AM UTC

Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services

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. 

Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:30 PM UTC

Last updated: Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC

I've been following the Microsoft 365 outage and I'm struggling to understand why recovery took so long.

IT infrastructure isn't my area of expertise, so I'm genuinely interested in what people with experience in these systems think.

What I don't understand is why a company of Microsoft's size wouldn't have a much more robust, layered approach to automated recovery.

Surely the scale of a failure should dictate the response? A handful of unresponsive servers warrants one level of recovery. Thousands failing across regions suggests a shared infrastructure issue and should immediately trigger a completely different response.

I'd expect increasingly independent recovery systems at each level, with the most protection given to the shared network, routing and management infrastructure capable of causing the most widespread failures.

For a catastrophic failure, why couldn't an automated system isolate small groups of machines, restore previously validated combinations of software and network configurations, and test different recovery approaches concurrently using simulated traffic?

The objective would be to establish a demonstrably stable configuration, even with severely reduced functionality or capacity, and progressively restore service. Data could be preserved separately for later reconciliation.

Meanwhile, engineering teams would continue investigating and fixing the actual problem. The automated recovery wouldn't replace their work, and wouldn't need to understand the defect before attempting restoration.

I realise this would require additional infrastructure, storage, maintenance and testing. But surely the greater the potential consequences of a failure at a particular level, the more investment in independent recovery at that level is justified?

Microsoft's updates described restarts, health-check changes, traffic redistribution and various attempted fixes. I'm not criticising engineers for trying different approaches. I'm questioning why a failure this widespread appeared to require such prolonged intervention to establish stable operation.

I also understand that the public updates won't tell us everything about Microsoft's internal response.

I'm not suggesting an infallible system or that every conceivable failure can be anticipated. I just find it surprising that such a critical service couldn't recover at least some limited functionality considerably sooner.

What am I missing? Are there fundamental technical limitations to this kind of hierarchical, largely automated recovery, or is it primarily a matter of architecture, complexity and investment?

Being considered for an AI business solutions/business apps sales role. Pros/cons? Comp expectations?

Not trying to bash Microsoft. Their statement was pretty transparent and they said a full post-incident report is coming.

But it made me realise most organisations I talk to treat M365 as “always on.” No out-of-band comms channel, no list of critical flows, no way to tell staff what’s happening if Teams and Outlook are both degraded.

For those who handled it well today: what did you have in place? Even something simple like an SMS tree or a status page outside the tenant?

I am guy who have used windows since 3.x era. I always defended it so it is the best for gaming and development. I am multi platform software architect,. I have made windows phone / tablet apps and so on. But every year this is harder to sell. Now the Windows 11 26H2. It is 40-50 minute update which just fails, twice (between 1 month).

It doesn't even ask "restart and update" instead just a "restart" can trigger it. This is the second time it fails on me and it started when I didn't want it to start. First I noticed that it killed my WSL. So I decided to boot and this happened. Also I had business meetings where I was suppose to show off the product what has been developed.

Not only I lost 1 hour of work time, I lost the meeting and all is now pushed back. No wonder Linux is catching. 2026 and forward. OSes should be less bloated. The direction is backwards. Fix this Microsoft or maybe it is time for new leadership? Focus on user experience, happiness and productivity instead max profit to get every small tiny secret from your user to sell for an ad.

2026 está acabando e as IAs dominando. Vibe CODE e todo mundo agora é Dev. Qual o futuro do Power plataform? Gostaria da opinião de quem atua hoje com Apps, Automate e até BI. Vi que o Claude está lançando um ecossistema office. Ainda vale a pena investir no ecossistema NoCode Microsoft?