Microsoft 365 recovery progresses after UK university disruption

Microsoft 365 services were recovering on Friday 13 November after disruption that began the previous day, with UK universities reporting returning email access while continuing to monitor services.

In an official update published at 15:56 UTC, Microsoft said it remained focused on residual problems and reliable restoration. It was assessing recovery across different connection methods and checking that service improvements were sustained.

The company’s incident notice says features that interact with Exchange Online and email are affected. These include access to Outlook mailboxes and possible delays to email delivery. Most core Teams functions, including calls, meetings and group chats, remain functional; calendar and scheduling features that depend on email can be affected.

Microsoft also said it had no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident.

Bath monitors Outlook as other services return

The University of Bath’s 16:00 UTC update said it was continuing to monitor Outlook and would review the incident again at 17:00. At 14:00 it had changed email and calendar services from downtime to degraded, as access began to return for many users.

Bath had separately reported at 15:10 that Teams, its applicant customer-management system and the operator section of its IT service portal were fully operational. Those updates describe the university’s own services.

Sussex reports email access returning

At 13:30 GMT, the University of Sussex said the disruption was easing. Email and calendar access were starting to return, with the university saying many people should now be able to use them again, although inboxes could take time to catch up.

Earlier in the day, Sussex had reported university email unavailable through desktop, mobile and web services. Its teaching spaces remained operational, and it said Canvas and Panopto were unaffected.

AP’s independent reporting described an outage extending into a second day across Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The overall number of people affected remained unclear.

Cover: AI-generated illustration of an imagined cloud-connected workspace, not a screenshot or outage photograph.