Microsoft outage continues, with ChatGPT and Claude also affected

Microsoft has been experiencing a major global outage since Thursday. Users are experiencing issues with Outlook, Teams and various other Microsoft 365 services. AI services such as ChatGPT and Claude are also affected.

The consequences are noticeable at companies and government agencies in several countries. Microsoft is working on a solution, but it is still unclear when all services will be functioning normally again.

The outage began on Thursday, November 12, and primarily affects Exchange Online, the service behind business Outlook accounts. Some users are unable to access their mailboxes, while emails are being delivered with delays. Calendars and appointments are also not always available.

In Microsoft Teams, most chat and calling features will continue to work. However, scheduling meetings and sending invitations may fail. In addition, Microsoft Copilot and various security services, among others, are experiencing problems.

The cause lies with overloaded servers. Microsoft discovered that certain servers were no longer responding and therefore went down. The network traffic then ended up on the remaining servers, which were therefore subjected to even heavier loads.

To resolve the outage, Microsoft restarted servers and rerouted network traffic. The company is also making adjustments to restore available capacity.

On Friday morning, Microsoft reported that the initial measures had led to improvements. The recovery is progressing gradually. So far, there are no indications that a cyberattack caused the outage.

The problems are not limited to Microsoft's own services. ChatGPT and Claude are also experiencing issues because their connections to Microsoft 365 are not working properly.

OpenAI confirmed that users may experience issues when linking their Microsoft account to ChatGPT. Retrieving data from linked business services may also fail.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, reported similar issues. In particular, features that retrieve emails, calendars and search results from Microsoft 365 are not working properly. The Claude extension for Outlook has also been affected.

This does not mean that ChatGPT and Claude are completely down. The issues mainly affect features that rely on Microsoft systems.

The outage also affects government agencies. A U.S. federal court reported on Thursday that court clerks were unable to send or receive emails for much of the day.

The Japanese Ministry of Finance and various government agencies in Singapore have also reported problems with their email systems.

The scale of the outage demonstrates how dependent companies and governments are on Microsoft. In October, the company reported that Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million paid business user licenses worldwide.

The actual number of people affected by the outage is not yet known.

Microsoft continues to restore the affected servers and monitor the operation of its services. The company has not yet announced a definitive time by which all issues must be resolved.