ODU News Alert - Microsoft 365 Outage

Microsoft is currently experiencing a widespread global service outage affecting Microsoft 365 services including Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Online.

How this affects you:

Email Access: You may be unable to sign in to Outlook, load your inbox, or view your calendar across desktop, web, and mobile apps. Sending & Receiving: Both internal and external emails are affected. If you are already logged in, outgoing messages may stay stuck in your Outbox or Drafts, and new incoming messages will be delayed. Your Messages Are Safe: Emails sent to you during this outage are not lost. Incoming mail is queued on mail servers and will deliver automatically once Microsoft restores connectivity.

What you should do right now:

Use Alternative Channels: Please use Microsoft Teams (which remains operational for most users), phone calls, or text messages for urgent communications. Do Not Repeatedly Reset Passwords: Login errors are caused by Microsoft's server connectivity, not your account credentials. Watch for Phishing: Be cautious of any suspicious emails or texts claiming to be "IT Support" asking you to verify your login during the outage.

Microsoft engineers are actively rerouting server traffic to restore service, though they have not yet provided an estimated time for full resolution. We will post an update as soon as normal email operations resume.

Latest Update from Microsoft

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
• Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft To Do
• Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, Auto Labelling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Communication Compliance, and Data Classification are impacted.

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.

Previous 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.

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.

Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 10:30 PM UTC