Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot, hitting Irish hospitals and councils

A major Microsoft 365 outage that began late on Thursday 12 November disrupted email, collaboration tools and AI services across the world on Friday, with Irish hospitals, councils and other public bodies among those affected.

Downdetector recorded around 130,000 reports of problems at its peak, across 74 countries according to the Irish Examiner. The disruption hit Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot, and left many users unable to load their mailboxes or reach work files.

Microsoft said it had “no indication of a cyber-attack”. In its updates, the company said efforts to improve service were not progressing as expected and described “sustained traffic management imbalances”. It also warned that servers it had brought back online could become unresponsive again once they started receiving traffic.

In Ireland, the HSE reported email disruption, and the Mater Hospital in Dublin told patients to phone rather than email. Schools, hospitals and pharmacies reported problems, while councils including Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and Limerick said their IT services and email were affected. Legal services across the country were also disrupted.

Gardaí warned Microsoft users in Ireland to be alert to scams while the outage continued, as fraudsters often exploit this kind of incident with fake support calls and phishing emails.

The timeline ran over more than a day. Downdetector first showed a spike in reports on Thursday evening, and RTÉ reported connectivity problems across several regions late that night. On Friday, Outlook and Teams were still down in the morning, and Microsoft said it was gradually restoring services. Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to result from a cyber-attack and apologised to customers. By the evening, RTÉ reported the outage was easing.

Organisations affected are advised to check Microsoft’s service status updates and to verify unexpected emails and calls before acting on them.