Auto dealers (and the rest of the world, in this case) are navigating yet another software outage after reports started flooding in around 1 p.m. that Microsoft and its many related platforms, including Outlook, Copilot, and fan-favorite Teams, were down.
Driving the news: Outlook problem reports on Downdetector jumped from near zero to about 130,000 around 1 p.m. ET, then tapered through the evening, the site’s data showed.
Teams reports peaked around 4,500, and OneDrive around 650.
Microsoft first said on X that the issue “may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”
Potentially impacted services include Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot, Planner and Intune, Microsoft said on its service health page.
The company later said on X that the trouble wasn’t caused by a traffic spike, “but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”
Microsoft said it paused all deployments, moved traffic and restarted servers, but those steps “have not provided the anticipated relief.”
It later found “a core process on affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, causing capacity loss.”
Reports for Amazon Web Services also spiked to about 1,300 on Downdetector at the same time. But AWS said on X that its services were “operating normally” and that an “unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet is prompting some inaccurate news reports.”
And of course, the outage affected auto dealerships, too.
The auto angle: A panel of dealers joined host Sam D’Arc for a breaking news edition of Daily Dealer Live to compare notes.
Ben Reuling, chief technology officer at Mark Miller Subaru in Salt Lake City, offered one theory for why outages like this can snowball now, though he stressed he couldn’t know for sure.
When a server goes down, providers usually shift its traffic to healthy servers, and most users never notice.
But unlike people, who refresh a few times and try again later, AI agents “will just sit there and ping and they will stack up call requests to these servers,” Reuling said, which can overwhelm the healthy ones too.
Also on the show: Panelists confirmed that how hard the outage hit depended on the store and its tech stack.
“Well, luckily we run on Google,” Chris Hudson, general manager of Mark Miller Subaru, said.
Still, for stores that run on Microsoft, the outage reached well past email, the panelists shared.
Internal communication: Outlook and Teams went down for groups that rely on them, including for chats with vendor partners, Dennis Gingrich, sales and finance director at The Niello Co., said.
CRMs: Software hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud could be affected too, Yuriy Demidko, chief technology and product officer at Clarivoy, said.
Business offices: Groups with a centralized business office and accounting will likely have “a more difficult time getting through this,” Gingrich said.
What to do: As they did during the CDK outage, Gingrich’s group found workarounds for internal messaging, while its CRM handled guest communications.
“All of our communication goes out to customers through our CRM,” Gingrich said. “So I don’t think we’re being impacted with our customer communication.”
More importantly: Demidko and Reuling warned against one tempting workaround: Asking customers to send documents to a personal email.
For one thing, it may not even work. Reuling said if the outage is hitting your store, your customers are likely dealing with the same thing and may not be able to get into their email either.
“Right now this is a Microsoft problem, and Microsoft is liable for the outage,” Reuling said. “The minute you go outside of your own security protocols and get customer information on an unsecured path, now it’s your compliance problem.”
Hudson, meanwhile, said stores should watch for phishing.
He called the outage “a huge opportunity for malicious actors to try to, out of desperation, try to get people to restore service by sending them some sort of link through Google to get into their Microsoft account or something.”
And if leads look soft tomorrow, don’t cut campaigns over one afternoon.
“I don’t think one day is indicative of any kind of change of behavior,” Demidko said. “I would really aim to look at the last 30, 60, 90 days.”
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What’s next: Around 9 p.m. ET, Microsoft said on X that it was “seeing positive results” from restarting affected infrastructure in an isolated way. It said it was monitoring those servers for stability, which it suspects “will support improved availability” as the fix is expanded more broadly.
Earlier, Microsoft said servers it had returned to service “can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic.”
It responded by limiting which types of traffic reach the affected infrastructure and rebuilding some servers “using a previous software configuration.”
The panel today (Nov. 12) had expected a quick fix. Demidko said service would be back “by tonight,” while Hudson guessed somewhere around 8 p.m. ET.
Usually, that’s a safe bet with the tech giants.
When Microsoft, Google, or Amazon goes down, service “should come back online relatively quickly,” Reuling said, adding that the bigger risk for dealers is an outage at a smaller vendor that runs on one of those clouds, which could knock out a DMS for days.
Either way, Demidko said the real question for dealers is the pattern: “Worry less about how long this outage goes for and worry about the frequency of outages that occur.”
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