A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 and Copilot across 74 countries and territories, leaving thousands of users unable to access email, messaging and collaboration tools. The disruption began on Thursday, 12 November, and continued into Friday, 13 November 2026, as Microsoft worked to restore service.
Businesses, government agencies and other organizations rely on Microsoft 365 for daily communication, so the outage reached far beyond individual inboxes. Users reported trouble loading Outlook, sending and receiving email, connecting to Teams and accessing Microsoft 365 services that depend on Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based messaging platform.
Outlook Problems Reached a Global Peak
Downdetector recorded 138,058 complaints about Outlook at around 6:00PM GMT on Thursday. That figure fell to roughly 34,490 by 11:00PM GMT as some recovery became visible, although many users still faced problems. In the United States, nearly 130,000 reports arrived shortly after 1:00PM Eastern Time, or 1800 GMT, before the number fell to about 37,000 by 6:00PM Eastern Time.
Downdetector also recorded more than 38,000 reports involving Microsoft 365 and roughly 4,500 reports concerning Teams. The outage moved beyond the Americas within about an hour, with reports from users across Europe, Asia and Africa. Microsoft 365 apps are used by over 430 million people, giving the disruption a large reach even when some services remained available.
Microsoft said features that rely on Exchange Online were hit hardest, while other Microsoft 365 components that do not depend on that platform remained functional. The company said a process responsible for creating secure server connections became overwhelmed, causing servers to stop processing requests.
Why Microsoft Servers Became Unavailable
Microsoft initially described the problem as “elevated load” across parts of its infrastructure. The company later clarified that traffic had not increased; instead, a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, placing extra strain on the servers that remained in service.
Microsoft said it was testing configuration changes to address a problem that caused servers to fail automated health checks. It paused deployments, moved traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted servers. Some restarted servers became unresponsive again after receiving traffic, which forced the company to study diagnostic data and test other recovery methods.
The company also scaled up virtual machines to reduce server load and forced the synchronisation of recent network changes. Not every machine synchronised as expected, delaying broader recovery. Microsoft reverted a recent network configuration change that coincided with the start of the outage while it evaluated whether that change contributed to the incident.
Microsoft said it had validated a different service health check method that allowed some affected servers to return to service. It was applying that method across more infrastructure and preparing automated recovery systems to detect and restart unresponsive servers.
“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” Microsoft said during the recovery effort.
Recovery Continued, But Service Was Not Stable
Microsoft reported partial recovery in parts of the Asia Pacific region after applying fixes, but the improvements did not remain fully stable. The company said traffic was being restored in stages and that users were seeing better access to mailboxes and delayed email processing, though intermittent issues continued.
“Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency,” Microsoft said.
The company also said its service improvements were “not taking as expected” and that it was monitoring the results of each change before applying further actions. Temporary traffic restrictions were introduced in selected locations to stabilise affected servers, with connectivity set to return gradually as systems improved.
Microsoft said it had not identified malicious activity behind the outage and would treat the incident “with urgency until full mitigation.” Earlier, the company described its response as “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
AI Connectors and Global Operations Felt the Impact
The disruption also affected AI services connected to Microsoft 365. OpenAI said it was investigating a problem in which new Microsoft connector connections could break and tools might not work as expected. Anthropic said an issue with an upstream provider was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Organizations around the world reported operational problems. U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call on its quarterly earnings. A Hong Kong aluminum company run by Danny Lau could not receive updates from U.S. customers through its Outlook accounts.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government emails were down and that it was working with Microsoft. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said the outage affected some operations, including email responses, while Japan’s Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the country’s government IT infrastructure was affected.
Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization said the outage had no major impact on federal government functions but had a significant effect on German businesses. Deutsche Bahn said it became difficult to send timetables for diverted trains, and a union leader said Britain’s state health service, the NHS, faced a “serious impact” on operations.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected and that it temporarily rerouted email services so customer questions could continue reaching the airline. IndiGo reported disruptions to its email support services but said its other support channels and flight operations remained operational.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft did not believe the incident was a cyberattack. Burke compared the situation to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024, when a bug in an update sent bad data to millions of computers and disrupted flights, television broadcasts, banks, hospitals and retailers.
Microsoft continued monitoring recovery measures and said it would make further changes as needed. As capacity returned, the company warned that users might experience a gradual recovery while their clients reconnected.
Based on
- Microsoft services outage disrupts Outlook and Teams worldwide — techmonitor.ai
- Microsoft battling major worldwide outage – CBS News — cbsnews.com
- Is Outlook down? Widespread outage hits Microsoft and OpenAI | The Independent — independent.co.uk
- Microsoft rules out ‘malicious activity’ in global outage — dw.com
- Global outage hits Microsoft Outlook | AFP.com — origin-zh9p7m-www.afp.com
