If your Outlook stopped connecting, emails stalled in your outbox, or Teams calls dropped on Thursday, your office wasn’t alone. Starting around midday on November 12, Microsoft 365 experienced a widespread service disruption affecting Exchange Online, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive for organizations across North America and beyond.

What Happened?

According to Microsoft’s service health updates, connectivity errors and server availability issues hit core Exchange Online infrastructure around midday, triggering cascading authentication and timeout errors across connected Microsoft 365 apps. Throughout the afternoon and evening, Microsoft engineers began rolling out a fix, restarting affected servers, and managing traffic pathways to relieve strain on healthy capacity. While outage reports have dropped sharply from their afternoon peak, intermittent delays have continued into Thursday night.

What It Means for Your Business

Because this outage originates inside Microsoft’s data centers, nothing on your local computers, firewalls, or office Wi-Fi caused the problem—and local troubleshooting won’t speed up the fix. Once Microsoft finishes stabilizing its servers, queued emails should process and deliver automatically.

4 Steps to Take Right Now

Leave your settings alone: Do not reset user passwords, delete Outlook profiles, or uninstall/reinstall Microsoft Office. Changing local settings during a cloud outage often creates secondary headaches once services come back online.
Work locally when needed: If you have Word, Excel, or PowerPoint installed on your desktop, you can still open and save files stored directly on your PC until OneDrive and SharePoint sync fully resumes.
Switch to phone or text for urgent matters: Don’t rely on email for time-sensitive approvals, dispatch, or customer callbacks until Microsoft confirms full restoration.
Stay alert for phishing: Cybercriminals closely watch the news for major IT outages and send fake “Microsoft Account Alert” or “Mailbox Full” messages hoping employees will enter their credentials.

Building Resilience for the Next Cloud Disruption

Cloud platforms like Microsoft 365 keep East Texas businesses running efficiently, but even the largest providers experience downtime. Extended disruptions are a practical reminder to review your business continuity setup—from secondary communication channels and local file backups to having a dedicated Managed Service Provider (MSP) watching your environment so your staff isn’t left guessing.

At Absolute Technology Solutions, we act as your outsourced IT department—monitoring issues in real time and keeping your team productive. If your business was caught off guard by Thursday’s outage or you want to review your continuity and cybersecurity plan, contact our East Texas team in Longview or Nacogdoches at 903-807-0303 or visit getabsolute.com.