Ask HN: Microsoft/Azure Outage?
For the past 5 minutes all of our Microsoft Cloud connections are down. Anyone else? The Status page won't even load.
No. It requires an account now, and they did away with the recent posts firehose.
ThousandEyes Internet Insights offers a public outage map at https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/ that is MASSIVELY more accurate (and faster to detect) than Down Detector because its based on actual telemetry and not on crowdsourcing.
They indicate sharepoint is getting blown out... again.
There will be a more detailed message when we finish the SII on our status page at the link I previously provided, but the short version is we took way more traffic than normal to our platform and the related workers were running out of memory.
I often know about outages dozens of minutes in advance of it being posted on official channels (or in the case of AWS, three days later...).
So what if the resolution is low because people can't log in to Fortnite and an Azure outage gets shown as an Epic Games outage. Doesn't matter. The live feed is incredibly reassuring from a "down for anyone else this instant, before official status page has a chance to see it?" Saves me so much time knowing whether it's a me-or-them issue.
And with Google is people complaining Chrome doesn't load their "pages". I bet they mean outlook.
That's a bold claim to make on HN.
"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."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-13/microsoft-outage-affe...
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: 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.
From the 9:01:14 UTC update:
Current status: 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.
From the 8:44 PM UTC update:
Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous 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.
https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365
Azure status does not document anything:
https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status
All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.
DDOS?
Edit: Oh, there it is.
This seems to be the smoking gnu, now what would it be ...
I saw a frog smoking on The Little Rascals once, but never a gnu.
EDIT: Seems like now they confirmed that: "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service."
@MSFT365Status
16m
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
One of GitHub's services will be down again by next week.
Lamest tech company imo. Why dont you lay off some more staff, Satya, maybe that will fix the problem.
SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.
Service quality is in better hands after the layoffs, at least that’s what investors are led to believe.
The number of times it has spit out a python program where a much simpler bash script would do, is too many to count.
I have a pet theory that if you don't know what you really want, and aren't skilled enough to understand what you got, infra code is THE WORST.
Anecdote: I wanted a simple change to an ansible playbook today. GPT-6-Astra/codex came up with the most convoluted, brittle solution possible the first time, even though it was extending and already clear, idiomatic playbook. It took some amount of offensive and critical prompting to get it to use ansible's built in modules and tooling to do the same job - and do so with nearly 80% less configuration and like 1000% more human readability.
Some part of me harbours a sneaking suspicion that the "throw everything at it" ethos is by design, not as a defensive measure against crappy code, but as a way to ensure there's so much code and it's so convoluted orgs and operators (or developers) are stuck/addicted.
It's still a force multiplier - but it's by no means driverless, especially for existing/already-running infra.
(they also used to have local admin rights on all of their client computers until one employee got phished and literally gave away their personal ID card via a webcam)
In any case, guess who got to implement all the relevant playbooks for installing software and what tool they used for it? Our company literally handed the job to an intern who had no IT background whatsoever. I say this not to be mean, he was legitimately just at our company because a government program required him to do an internship.
He used Deepseek (our company does not believe in purchasing LLM subscriptions, at least not for us normal employees) to write literally all of the playbooks for any kind of software that mattered to our clients.
Now, as I said before, I am only an apprentice, and I am certainly not a good programmer by any means, but I read through parts of the Ansible documentation and had worked with it before, and I understood enough to at least be able to roughly judge whether a playbook made sense or was just way too complicated and convoluted.
I had to help this intern out multiple times, because he hadn't yet understood that, in order to write a functioning playbook, you first had to somewhat understand how to deploy a piece of software on a single test machine using CMD or Powershell syntax with an according .exe or .msi.
He simply prompted, pasted the playbook and then reprompted with the error codes from the failed playbook until it somehow worked or until I had to help him out.
This took place in December or November of last year and the playbooks are mostly still pretty shitty if I am being honest.
I did take away an important lesson from this "episode", though: LLMs can be very usefuly for writing code, or in this case, Ansible playbooks, but only if you have a somewhat decent and basic grasp of how software installation works via CMD/powershell and if you took the time to read through and learn about at least the basic Ansible concepts.
Since I am only an apprentice (on paper and in terms of my knowledge and how I get paid, not in terms of how much I am expected to earn for the company), I have painfully experienced how important it is to possess a certain level of understanding about the infra-related code and scripts that you would like LLMs to write for you, because otherwise it very quickly spirals out of control and starts throwing everything at the problem, just as you described.
That is a software issue.
Interesting: there's a huge correlation with everybody beginning to use LLMs.
And we dismiss it as being non-causal by saying it all started going downhill before the advent of LLMs?
I don't buy it. I think we're seeing the results of what happens when you hand the keys of the kingdom to LLMs.
Current industry best practice is to use LLMs improperly.
It's been full speed downhill for many years, and the failure modes are pretty distinct.
> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."
Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…
Status page is down. Much of our org is halted.
Fingers crossed that Azure isn't impacted (seems fine so far)
(https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...)
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
Or is this just a gesture of goodwill to avoid people jumping the ship on their own?
And the other part is the "goodwill" you mention - if you jettison people for nothin en masse, word gets out, and make it hard to hire in the future
Claims do affect the rate they pay next year, but the company isn’t “on the hook” for you personally, at least not any more than they are for your social security income.
People who aren't motivated and/or don't back themselves to get another job will stay (i.e. probably the people you want to get rid of)
The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"
Updates below in reverse chronological order:
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC 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.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:
Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services
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: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.
More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:
- Outlook on the web
- Messaging API (MAPI)
- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)
- Representational State Transfer (REST) API
Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.
Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC
---
Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.
Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.
Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).
Edit: The RSS feed seems to load fairly quickly: https://status.cloud.microsoft/api/feed/mac
The biggest site I work for, who went M365 hybrid last year, has incurred more Exchange downtime today than they had all of last year with their on-prem Exchange servers.
What MS has posted so far:
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543. 12:54 PM · Nov 12, 2026
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> 20m >> We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.
It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.
Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.
None of the admin ran shops are down 1 day per year.
My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.
While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.
Edit: Typo.
A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.
So in 10h
Now? I dont care Im logged off.
- live.com is down
- onedrive loads the UI, but all of my contents are missing
- MS Edge sync is down (503s )
Yup, major-major outage.
[1] https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla