Microsoft had a severe service outage that impacted access to numerous of its products, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and its AI assistant Copilot.
Outage-tracking platform Downdetector said the outage impacted customers in 74 countries and territories. Thousands of people couldn’t get into their email accounts, send and receive messages, and utilize other Microsoft services.
The outage started on Thursday, November 12, 2026, in the afternoon and impacted businesses, government institutions, and people that rely on Microsoft’s services for everyday communication and work. Some customers were unable to access their Outlook inboxes, while others were having trouble with Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps.
Microsoft said it was looking into the matter, having observed unusually high loads across its infrastructure in several countries. Later the corporation found out that some of the servers were failing the automated health checks, and then they were unreachable.
Microsoft has been working to reroute traffic and restore services, putting further pressure on the surviving infrastructure of the affected servers. But, after restarting several servers, they were unresponsive again, making it more difficult to recover.
The company said it was trying to restore disrupted services and ease the strain on its infrastructure. Microsoft also said it had seen no evidence of a cyberattack in relation to the disruption.
The incident highlighted the impact that technological failures at large technology providers can have on businesses and organizations that rely on cloud-based services. The disruption impacted a number of key office processes, with many organizations relying on Microsoft 365 for email, communication, and document management.
Read Also: Namibia Gambling Board Extends Technology Tender
In an update on Friday, November 13, Microsoft reported marginal success in its efforts to restore the affected services. The company said it had applied patches and restarted some of its infrastructure, although recovery efforts were still ongoing. It later reported improvements in server stability as it continued working to restore normal service capacity.
