Posted by dkpk 5 hours ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft...
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.
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
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)
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.
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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.
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.