Reuters: Microsoft 365 Outage Lasted Over Five Hours and Hit Connectors Used by OpenAI and Anthropic
Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday, with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services
Context
AI assistants increasingly depend on connectors to email and documents, so an outage at one provider now breaks AI workflows too.
ChatGPT and Claude both offer connectors that read and act on Microsoft 365 data such as Outlook mail and Teams. On November 12 a broad Microsoft 365 outage disrupted those services for thousands of users.
Deep dive
Reuters posted on November 12 that Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft apps remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday. Reuters said the outage also hit connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services.
Earlier in the evening, Gergely Orosz posted that there was a massive Microsoft outage, that Outlook.com appeared to be down globally, and that Microsoft employees and other Microsoft 365 users could not send or receive email. He attached a screenshot of a Microsoft 365 service status notice marked service degradation, which said users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services. The notice listed Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Planner, To Do, Intune, Defender for Office 365, several Purview services and Power BI exports among the potentially affected services.
The posts did not give a cause for the outage. The incident shows how AI tools that act on a company's mail and files inherit the reliability of the systems they connect to.
What to expect next
Watch for Microsoft's postmortem on the cause and duration, and for any statements from OpenAI or Anthropic on how their connectors behaved. Enterprise buyers may push AI vendors for clearer fallbacks when a connected service is down. Repeated outages would add weight to arguments for spreading critical workflows across more than one provider. Watch also whether Microsoft offers service credits to affected customers.