Microsoft 365 services impacted - Outlook & Teams

Incident Report for UNC Chapel Hill - ITS

Resolved

This inicdent has been resolved.

This issue has been stable after a fix was implemented and monitored.

Posted Nov 14, 2026 - 09:02 EST

Monitoring

Microsoft 365 services appear to have recovered and we are not receiving any new reports of issues. We will continue to monitor the situation, but there are no new updates from Microsoft at this time.
Posted Nov 13, 2026 - 09:46 EST

Update

Current Status: We're seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements now observed in North America and sustained improvements across much of Europe. We're also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure.

Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in the remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs. We're closely monitoring service consistency and validating recovery across different connection methods as we work toward full mitigation.
Posted Nov 13, 2026 - 08:35 EST

Identified

Features of the Microsoft 365 services below that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional.
- Exchange Online: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed.
- Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be unable to load some admin center pages.
- Microsoft 365 apps: Users may be unable to view their recently used files.
- Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory are affected.
- Microsoft 365 Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.
- Microsoft Copilot 365: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Some Defender for Office 365 experiences that rely on Purview DLP/Information Protection signals may experience delays or failures in policy evaluation and governance action enforcement. Admins/SOCs may experience delays or failures when accessing NHI features that rely on Data Classification Sensitivity Labels, including Tenant Metrics, Policy, and Data Usage, across the Identity, OAuth, and App Governance pages in the Security portal on Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.
- Microsoft Defender XDR: Users may be unable to load Microsoft Defender portal pages or solution tabs.
- Microsoft Fabric: Users may encounter failures when exporting reports with sensitivity labels to PDF or PowerPoint, when updating artifacts with sensitivity labels, or opening pbix with sensitivity label in Power BI Desktop. As a workaround, users can remove the sensitivity label from the affected item to complete the operation, if their organization's data protection policies allow it.
- Microsoft Graph: API requests that access Exchange Online data, such as mail, calendar, and contacts, may time out and prevent users from managing Teams, Channels, Membership, Apps management and send activity notifications using Graph API.
- Microsoft Intune: Scenarios including device enrollment, device check-in, and device compliance policies may have been intermittently impacted.
- Microsoft Planner: Users are experiencing Plan and Task operation reliability issues.
- Microsoft Power Apps: Users may be intermittently unable to sign-in to the Power Apps or Field Service mobile apps. Affected users may be able to utilize Power Apps or Field Service on the web as a way to circumvent impact, and users who are already signed in can potentially avoid impact by not signing out, clearing app data, or reinstalling while the issue is ongoing.
- Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, auto-labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) across Microsoft 365 services, Communication Compliance, Information Protection label and auto-labeling policies, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Data Classification are impacted, and users may be unable to open or load Microsoft Purview portal pages or protected content. Audit searches, protected content creation, eDiscovery tasks such as search and export, Data Classification and On Demand Scan features may also be impacted.
- Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels.
- Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.
- Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.
- SharePoint Online: Some users may experience issues when sharing SharePoint Online files with people outside their organization, where external sharing is permitted by both organization-level and site-level settings. Additionally, features that depend on Exchange Online may be impacted. Accessing files stored directly in SharePoint Online remains functional.
- Universal Print: Users may encounter errors submitting print jobs or using admin features.
- Windows 365: Customers who have configured their tenant and Cloud PCs to use Microsoft Purview Customer Key for Windows 365 Cloud PCs may have users who are unable to connect to their Cloud PCs.
Current status: We've made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region. Traffic is being gradually restored, and we're seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.
Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency.
Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.
At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
Posted Nov 13, 2026 - 06:47 EST

Investigating

Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure. We are seeing early signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced.Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. Engineering teams are cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely. We are also evaluating additional mitigation options to improve recovery speed and consistency. Network and traffic-management actions remain in progress, and we continue to prioritize backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery. As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues. At this time, we are not aware of any malicious activity causing this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after recovery is complete.
Posted Nov 13, 2026 - 04:38 EST

Update

More info: Features of the Microsoft 365 services below that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional.
- Exchange Online: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed.
- Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be unable to load some admin center pages.
- Microsoft 365 apps: Users may be unable to view their recently used files.
- Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory are affected.
- Microsoft 365 Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.
- Microsoft Copilot 365: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Safe Links may be unable to verify URLs, which may impact users clicking links in Outlook and Teams.
- Microsoft Defender XDR: Users may be unable to load Microsoft Defender portal pages or solution tabs.
- Microsoft Fabric: Users may encounter failures when exporting reports with sensitivity labels to PDF or PowerPoint, when updating artifacts with sensitivity labels, or opening pbix with sensitivity label in Power BI Desktop. As a workaround, users can remove the sensitivity label from the affected item to complete the operation, if their organization's data protection policies allow it.
- Microsoft Graph: API requests that access Exchange Online data, such as mail, calendar, and contacts, may time out and prevent users from managing Teams, Channels, Membership, Apps management and send activity notifications using Graph API.
- Microsoft Intune: Scenarios including device enrollment, device check-in, and device compliance policies may have been intermittently impacted.
- Microsoft Planner: Users are experiencing Plan and Task operation reliability issues.
- Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, auto-labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) across Microsoft 365 services, Communication Compliance, Information Protection label and auto-labeling policies, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Data Classification are impacted, and users may be unable to open or load Microsoft Purview portal pages or protected content. Audit searches, protected content creation, eDiscovery tasks such as search and export, Data Classification and On Demand Scan features may also be impacted.
- Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels.
- Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.
- Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.
- SharePoint Online: Features that depend on Exchange Online may be impacted. Accessing files stored directly in SharePoint Online remains functional.
- Universal Print: Users may encounter errors submitting print jobs or using admin features.
- Windows 365: Customers who have configured their tenant and Cloud PCs to use Microsoft Purview Customer Key for Windows 365 Cloud PCs may have users who are unable to connect to their Cloud PCs.
Current status: As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious activity. We’ll continue to apply learnings towards remediation actions as we confirm effectiveness mitigation actions.

Previous status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 23:30 EST

Update

Latest Microsoft Update:

Our investigation has found that a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests. We're preparing a configuration change to address this behavior that can be applied across all affected servers, and we're validating it on a subset of servers before applying it more broadly alongside restarts of the affected infrastructure. In parallel, we've begun reverting a recent network configuration change that correlates with the start of impact and are monitoring to determine whether this contributes to recovery. The temporary traffic limitations we previously described are now in effect in specific locations. We're monitoring the affected servers in those locations to confirm whether they remain stable while handling a narrower set of connections, after which we'll gradually reintroduce additional traffic.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 20:20 EST

Update

Latest Microsoft Update:
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.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 18:29 EST

Update

Latest Microsoft Update:
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.

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
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 17:18 EST

Update

Microsoft Update:

We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 16:28 EST

Update

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: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 15:23 EST

Update

Lastest information from Microsoft:
We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure. We're working to safely return them to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as status.cloud.microsoft.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 14:54 EST

Update

Microsoft is continuing to work on a fix for this issue.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 14:28 EST

Identified

Microsoft has provided the following update:

Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 14:06 EST

Investigating

Outlook may be unavailable for some users at this time. This appears to be a larger issue affecting many Outlook customers. Microsoft is investigating the issue at this time.
Posted Nov 12, 2026 - 13:27 EST
This incident affected: Office 365 (Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, Other Office 365 Services).