Microsoft faces Labor Department criticism after Outlook outage

The US Labor Department Inspector General mocked Microsoft on X over its Outlook outage, contrasting the company's ability to process 6,000 H-1B applications with its struggle to restore email access. The November 12 outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services, affecting nearly 130,000 users and businesses across several countries. Microsoft attributed the issue to elevated load and servers failing automated health checks. The disruption lasted over 12 hours, also impacting AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft reported improving stability by Friday, with email queues nearing normal levels, though some users still faced intermittent access problems.