Outlook goes dark for a day as eBay bars robot shoppers

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This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Saturday, November 14th, 2026

This episode is read by an AI voice.

Today, Microsoft's business email goes dark for most of a day. eBay shuts the door on shopping agents it didn't invite. Apple gives apps in Germany a second chance to ask about tracking, and connected TV buyers say they still don't trust what they're buying.

We start with an outage that a lot of offices felt. On Thursday afternoon, US time, Microsoft's Exchange Online started failing. By early Friday, Microsoft's status page listed 19 Microsoft 365 services affected, from Outlook on the web and desktop, to mail delivery, security tools and Copilot. One line on that page will sting anyone sold on AI at work. Copilot may be unable to access work data, such as email, calendar and files.

Down detector reports for Outlook in the US peaked above 120,000, and more than 11 hours in, Microsoft still had no root cause. It said it wasn't aware of any malicious activity. The network data tells the rest. Kentic saw Exchange traffic running about 85% below normal from Thursday evening, European time. Recovery started late Friday morning, and within two hours, traffic was running about 19% above normal, as 18 hours of queued mail landed all at once. Devices opened up to 70% more connections, while the servers answered barely a quarter of them, and the retries kept knocking recovering servers back over. Cloudflare saw roughly one in three sign-in requests fail.

Kentix Doug Midori summed it up, Microsoft's Exchange Online is back, and then some. By Microsoft's own afternoon update, the incident had run 21 hours and 21 minutes, and was still marked as degraded. Microsoft paused all deployments and extended email timeouts to 48 hours, so queued messages wouldn't bounce.

By Microsoft's own afternoon update, the incident had run 21 hours and 21 minutes, and was still marked as degraded. Microsoft paused all deployments and extended email timeouts to 48 hours, so queued messages wouldn't bounce. Government offices in Japan, Australia, Singapore, and Portugal were hit, along with banks and airlines. So what about the ads? Mostly nothing. Exchange Online runs Outlook for businesses, and that version of Outlook carries no ads. So this one landed on office workers, not on ad inventory.

Microsoft's ads liaison, Nava Hopkins, told Search Engine Roundtable that Microsoft Advertising wasn't impacted directly, with at most some weakness in Outlook ad requests at the margins.

Microsoft later blamed an earlier network capacity upgrade and added that this was a technical issue, not related to cyber or AI agents. Now, while one giant struggled to deliver mail, another decided who gets to shop. eBay's user agreement bans buy-for-me agents and bots that place orders without human review, unless eBay gives permission first. That rule has been there since February. What changed this month is that Meta's Muse agent lost reliable access to eBay listings. And Muse is the big one. Earlier data from Human Security put its share of daily AI agent requests at 72 percent. An eBay spokesperson said the company has restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on its data. eBay hasn't said which agents are allowed in, or how to ask. People aren't exactly begging to be carried along, either. A survey for Shift Browser, of just over a thousand US. Internet users, found 64% want a browser they steer, even if that means more decisions. 68% had used an AI tool instead of search in the past six months. So people like AI, they just don't want it taking the wheel. A bit like letting a teenager borrow the car, but only if you're sitting in the passenger seat. Opera added its own numbers. Among people who use Chrome, Edge, or Safari as their main browser, 16% didn't know a browser could be changed. Its report put it neatly. For many mainstream users, the browser was never a decision. Vivaldi launched an enterprise version that costs nothing to license and proudly ships with no AI chatbots or agents at all.

Over to privacy, starting with Apple. Apple's tracking prompt has been the biggest headache for mobile advertisers since 2021 In Germany, it's about to change. Under commitments to the Competition Authority, apps can show a redesigned prompt once more, even to people who already said no, and then ask again every year. The new prompt drops the word track entirely. Apple can't charge for access to the ad identifier, and the rules run for seven years. Opt-in rates under the old prompt were often estimated at 11-15%, though Adjust measured 38% earlier this year.

IAB Europe published a 30-page guide asking regulators to reward Provisie Enhancing Technologies, and its line was catchy. PETs turn legal requirements into verifiable code. Germany's digital association, BVDW, published a voluntary code for AI at Work, including a named owner and a kill switch for every AI agent, and Ireland's data regulator fined Tinder's operator 11 million euros because its Download My Data tool left things out. That inquiry started in 2020, so nearly seven years.