Microsoft Global Outage 2026: Why Outlook and Teams Stopped Working

A global Microsoft outage on November 12, 2026 affected a range of services including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft 365. The outage caused problems for users in 74 countries and led to almost 130,000 reports of Outlook issues through the Downdetector service. Microsoft said that the increased load was caused by unexpected server failures and issues with automated health checks. There was no increased traffic, and the organization has said there is no evidence of a cyberattack. Recovery work continued throughout November 13.

What Microsoft Services Were Affected?

There was an outage within Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite.

Initially the outage affected users in the Americas, but then expanded to other areas like Asia-Pacific. 74 countries were affected with reports on Downdetector.

Major services affected include,

overall there were issues within Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online reliant services. Microsoft have said that services/ features using Exchange Online were more affected. But some features not reliant on Exchange Online were not affected. Microsoft Teams chats and meetings were less affected than email services.

What Caused the Outage?

Microsoft said that there was increased load across some of their infrastructure, however upon investigation they found that this wasn’t due to a spike in user traffic.

• It was due to unexpected unavailability of a number of servers.
• Automated Health Checks Failed
• A major cause of the outage was due to automated health checks failing.
• Automated health checks are put in place to monitor if servers are working correctly. This allows systems that are not responding or are not healthy to be removed.
• During the outage, the affected servers were failing the health checks. This meant less infrastructure was available, causing more load on the servers.

Microsoft also looked into if the component handling the health checks was causing any issues, potentially due to a change in configuration.

Why Did the Outage Impact So Much?

The outage caused an increased load across Microsoft’s infrastructure.

With multiple servers becoming unavailable, there was an increased amount of connection requests to the servers that were still available. This caused increased load.

This demonstrates how if one area fails within a large-scale cloud infrastructure, it can impact many services.

Was the Outage Due to a Cyber Attack?

No evidence of a cyber attack.

Microsoft has stated that there was no evidence that the outage was due to any malicious activity or cyber attacks. Microsoft has said that the issue was due to server unavailability and failed automated health checks. Australia’s Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke has also stated that Microsoft don’t believe they are dealing with a cyber attack.

This means that the outage was due to an infrastructure and service reliability issue.

How Did Microsoft Respond?

A number of actions were taken to resolve the issues and reduce the load on their infrastructure.

• Redirecting traffic – Connection traffic was redirected to different pieces of infrastructure.
• Restarting servers – Microsoft restarted the affected servers.
• Making changes – Microsoft made changes to try and bypass the component thought to be causing the health checks to fail.
• Pausing deployments – Microsoft paused deployments.
• Improving automated recovery – Work was done to improve the automated recovery process to identify and restart the unresponsive servers.

Some of the servers were brought back online, however, initial steps to resolve the issues weren’t sustainable. Microsoft has said that some servers became unresponsive again when traffic was redirected to them.

When Will Microsoft Services Be Fully Back Online?

As of November 13, 2026 Microsoft are still working on resolving the issues. Some users have been able to get back online but thousands are still experiencing issues. Particularly issues with Outlook and Microsoft 365.

According to Reuters, there were over 130,000 reports of Outlook issues in the United States around 1pm ET on November 12. By 11.30pm ET, there were over 18,000 reports.

The outage also impacted users within India, Australia and Japan during business hours. Microsoft has said that they have partially resolved the issues in some areas but they haven’t fully recovered as they have made changes to their infrastructure.

Microsoft has not given a definitive time frame for full recovery. Users have been warned that it may take some time as servers come back online and applications connect.

Impact on Businesses and Organizations

More than just individual users were impacted. A number of businesses and public organizations had issues due to their reliance on Microsoft’s cloud-based services.

• India – Airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air had issues with their email support.
• Australia – Government agencies such as their spy agency and federal police were impacted.
• Japan – Government information systems were impacted.
• United States – The US House of Representatives said their users were impacted.
• AI – OpenAI and Anthropic had issues with their Microsoft 365 connectors.

This shows how much businesses and public institutions rely on cloud-based productivity suites and having alternative communications and recovery options in place is important.