"Microsoft is down. Teams isn't working, Outlook isn't working. But Excel, damn it, is immortal!": Social media exploded with memes about Microsoft's global outage

On Thursday, November 12, a large-scale global outage occurred in key Microsoft services . Due to technical problems, millions of users in 74 countries around the world lost access to the Microsoft 365 package (primarily Exchange Online), Outlook mail, Teams messenger, OneDrive cloud storage, and Copilot AI assistant.

The company explained that the incident was caused by an “unexpected unavailability” of some servers that failed to pass automatic health checks in time. This caused a critical overload on the rest of the infrastructure, although engineers later managed to find a way to fix the problem.

The outage significantly impacted the work of government agencies, banks, and large businesses around the world, and also affected the activities of leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

The Ukrainian market, where Microsoft products are used by many major players, was also affected. As reported by dev.ua, EPAM confirmed outages with the Outlook email client , although the Teams messenger continued to work stably there. A similar situation slowed down work processes in the domestic telecom sector: the IT department of one of the major Ukrainian Internet providers warned employees about the unstable operation of the corporation's services in the morning.