Massive Microsoft Outage Hits Outlook, Teams (2026)

A global Microsoft outage has knocked Outlook, Teams and Copilot offline for users around the world, and more than 18 hours after it began Microsoft still has not given a time for full recovery. The disruption started on Thursday, November 12, 2026, and spread across 74 countries, with Outlook problem reports on Downdetector peaking at around 130,000.

The Microsoft outage centers on Exchange Online, the cloud service that powers business email in Outlook. Microsoft logged the incident as EX1550543 at 16:17 UTC, when users first reported they could not open their mailboxes through Outlook on the web, the desktop app and phone mail apps. At 18:26 UTC the company opened a second, broader advisory, MO1550821, covering every Microsoft 365 service that depends on Exchange Online.

According to Microsoft, the affected services include Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR. The advisory later added Planner, To Do, Intune and Defender for Office 365. Features that do not depend on Exchange Online kept working, Microsoft said, but email delivery may be delayed and Teams calendar access and meeting scheduling can fail.

Microsoft outage 2026: Microsoft Redmond campus Building 92 — Microsoft’s Building 92 at its Redmond campus. Photo: Jiaqian AirplaneFan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What Caused the Microsoft Outage

Microsoft says the problem started inside its own infrastructure, not with a surge in traffic. A large number of its servers unexpectedly began failing automated health checks and dropped out of service. The work those servers handled shifted onto the machines that were left, and a core process that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed, which made healthy servers stop responding in turn.

The company says it is testing a configuration change aimed at the faulty process, restarting affected servers, and reverting a recent network change that lines up with the start of the outage. Engineers have also frozen routine software deployments and configuration updates, rerouted user traffic onto alternative infrastructure, and deployed a different health check method so restarted servers can rejoin the network safely.

Is the Microsoft Outage a Cyberattack?

No, according to Microsoft. The company says it is not aware of any malicious activity behind the disruption, and a spokesperson told ABC News there was no indication of a cyberattack. Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said after a briefing from Microsoft and the national cyber security coordinator that neither believed it was a cyber event. Microsoft has still not published a full root cause, and says a post-incident report will follow once the outage is contained.

How Bad Is the Disruption?

Downdetector logged roughly 130,000 Outlook problem reports at the peak, around 1:09 p.m. ET on Thursday, and reports came in from 74 countries and territories within about an hour. By Friday morning in the UK, the tracker had logged at least 43,000 Outlook reports, and more than 18,000 users in the United States were still reporting Outlook problems late on Thursday night. The outage hit GP surgeries, pharmacies, schools, police forces and Parliament in the UK, according to the BBC, while electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its third-quarter results to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the outage.

What Is the Latest on Recovery?

Microsoft reported “incremental improvement” in several services on Friday morning, November 13, and said it was seeing early signs of stabilization as it carefully reintroduced traffic. But the company also said capacity had not returned to normal, service health still varied by region, and it had given no time for full recovery. To protect mail caught in the disruption, Microsoft extended its email timeout to 48 hours so delayed messages are not lost.

Users who cannot reach Outlook can check the live position on Microsoft’s status page at status.cloud.microsoft, or follow the Microsoft 365 Status account on X, where the company posts updates under incident numbers EX1550543 and MO1550821. A separate, shorter Teams incident on Thursday afternoon, which delayed and failed chat messages in the Americas, was resolved the same day.

Third Major Microsoft 365 Outage This Year

The disruption is the third major Microsoft 365 outage of 2026, following multi-hour outages in January and a code update failure in August that took several days to fully resolve, according to Business Today. It also comes in a week of major tech news, with Nvidia announcing on November 12 that chief executive Jensen Huang had resigned after 33 years.

For now, the advice from Microsoft is patience: keep retrying, expect delayed mail, and wait for capacity to return before assuming a mailbox is lost.

Sources: The Hindu, USA Today, Business Today, Outlook India, Ransom News

Check the Content

Axee Davies

Axee Davies is the founder of AxeeTech, publishing gaming guides, codes, and Windows how-tos since March 2013. A tech enthusiast for 13+ years — starting with smartphones and Android rooting — he now runs a site that puts out a new guide every day for Roblox players, traders, and Windows users. More about AxeeTech

axeetech.com