The Microsoft Outlook down reports started piling up on Thursday, Nov. 12, and they did not stop quickly. Outlook email services and Copilot went dark for tens of thousands of people that afternoon, turning a routine workday into a digital standstill.

The First Spike

Outage tracker Downdetector logged a jump in complaints about Microsoft 365 services just after 12 p.m. ET. By 12:55 p.m. ET, 22,323 users had reported problems.

Outlook took the hardest hit. Just before 1 p.m. ET, it had nearly 83,000 reported outages. Around the same time, about 2,000 users reported issues with Teams, and 4,400 flagged disruptions to Copilot.

Microsoft’s Trail of Updates

Microsoft’s official X account had already posted at 10:40 a.m. ET about “issues when accessing or using Microsoft Teams functionality in North America.” In the same thread, the company said those problems were resolved around noon.

That relief did not last. A newer post, just before 1 p.m. ET, delivered fresh bad news: “We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”

Microsoft did not immediately respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.

Numbers Climb, Then Begin to Slip

Outlook outage reports hit a peak of 128,874 at 1:09 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector. Then the tide began to turn. By about 1:50 p.m. ET, the count had fallen to 92,914.

Microsoft 365 followed a similar arc. Reports dropped from a peak of more than 46,000 to about 37,000 as of 1:50 p.m. ET.

A Second Wave Before 2 p.m.

The storm was not over. Just before 2 p.m. ET, outages still plagued Microsoft products. Downdetector showed Microsoft 365 hitting a new peak of more than 47,000 reports around 1:20 p.m. At that moment, Outlook was just shy of 130,000 reported outages.

Microsoft Reroutes the Traffic

At 1:07 p.m. ET, Microsoft warned on X: “While we’re working to mitigate impact, we’ve confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”

Then came a fix that works like opening extra lanes on a jammed highway. At 1:48 p.m. ET, the company said it had “begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load.”