Key takeaways: A global Microsoft outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services across 74 countries from Thursday afternoon. Microsoft blames overloaded servers, rules out a cyberattack, and says recovery is progressing but not yet complete.
A global outage knocked out Microsoft’s Outlook email service and disrupted Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 apps for users in 74 countries on Thursday, and the disruption stretched into a second day on Friday as engineers worked to restore services.
Problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, November 12, when users reported they could not open Outlook or send and receive mail. Within about an hour, outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories, with about 130,000 reports at the peak. Microsoft said part of its Exchange Online infrastructure was experiencing elevated load that was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”.
What caused the outage
Microsoft said servers became unexpectedly unavailable while the company was deploying a targeted change, leaving many affected servers unresponsive. Engineers have been restarting the servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and applying the same fix across other affected parts of the infrastructure. The company admitted its first fixes were “not taking as expected” as it tried alternative approaches.
Microsoft said it had no evidence of malicious activity behind the incident, and Charles Lamanna, the company’s executive vice president for Copilot, agents and platform, said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack. The company has promised a full report on the root cause once the outage is fully mitigated.
Disruption reaches hospitals, courts and railways
The impact spread well beyond office inboxes. In England, the National Health Service said the outage was having a “serious impact” and hospitals fell back on paper records, while patients were urged to attend appointments as usual. Norway’s parliament and several ministries lost access to email, and between 80 and 90 municipalities in Denmark were affected. Germany’s national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, said Outlook was so sluggish that it could barely send out timetables for diverted trains, and the Philippine Supreme Court warned that responses to emails and other transactions would be delayed.
In Manchester, a judge sent jurors home early from a trial after the outage caused delays, telling them of the dangers of reliance on computer systems and platforms. In the United States, a county jail in Colorado could not process online bond payments, leaving some prisoners unable to be released. Microsoft shares fell 2.6 per cent in premarket trading on Friday after closing at $523 on Thursday.
Why it matters
The outage is a reminder of how much of daily work now runs through a small number of platforms. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company, and governments, hospitals, courts and railways all depend on the same services. It is the third major infrastructure failure in just over a year, after an Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025 and a Cloudflare outage in November 2025 disrupted large parts of the internet, and the CrowdStrike failure of July 2024 that hit Microsoft customers worldwide.
What happens next
Microsoft said on Friday it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue”, with email delivery improving across a growing share of affected systems, but it has not confirmed full restoration. To protect delayed mail, the company extended the email timeout to 48 hours, so messages sent during the outage should still arrive as backlogs clear. Users can expect intermittent problems until the remaining infrastructure is restored, and the company’s promised root-cause report will show whether a faulty change, rather than an attack, brought down one of the world’s most widely used workplace platforms.
Frequently asked questions
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft said servers became unexpectedly unavailable during a targeted change, creating elevated load and connectivity errors across its Exchange Online infrastructure. The company said there was no evidence of malicious activity.
Which services were affected?
Outlook was hit hardest, along with Teams, Copilot, OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 services that depend on Exchange Online.
Is the outage over?
Not fully. Microsoft reported improving service across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific on Friday, November 13, but said some users may still face intermittent issues and has not confirmed full restoration.
Sources
- Al Jazeera, “Live: Microsoft struggles to restore services as outage hits global users,” November 13, 2026
- The Hindu, “Microsoft Outage LIVE: Microsoft extends mail timeout to 48 hours as outage hits governments, organisations worldwide,” November 13, 2026
- Gulf News, “Microsoft outage updates: Outlook, Teams down for millions as UAE users report disruption,” November 13, 2026
- Stuff, “Microsoft global outage affecting hundreds of thousands,” November 13, 2026
