Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Outlook and Teams From Asia to the US
A Microsoft 365 outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for many users from Asia to the US. Microsoft says it sees no sign of malicious activity and has begun restoring Asia Pacific infrastructure, while airlines, governments and companies reported disruption to email.
Microsoft said on Friday, November 13, 2026, that it had begun restoring Outlook, Teams and Copilot after an outage that hit Microsoft 365 users from Asia to the United States, starting with infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region.
The company also published new AI research from IDC on its microsoft.com blog on November 12. That study is covered further down.
What Microsoft said about the outage
Microsoft said the problem affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services tied to Exchange Online and email. Users reported Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant as down.
The company said it was using "a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure." It said it had no indication that malicious activity caused the outage and would treat the incident "with urgency until full mitigation."
Recovery actions were complete across portions of the Asia Pacific infrastructure, Microsoft said. Traffic is being gradually restored, and mailbox access and delayed email processing have improved, though some users may still see intermittent problems.
Next, Microsoft said, it will extend those fixes to other regions and add supporting capacity.
Who was affected
More than 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook on outage tracker Downdetector on Thursday, November 12. New reports have since fallen from that peak. Microsoft says more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps.
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported trouble connecting with Microsoft 365 tools. US industrial technology company Workhorse Group delayed a quarterly earnings call because of the outage.
Air India said flight operations were unaffected but temporarily rerouted its email services. IndiGo reported disruption to its email support, while saying flights and other support channels kept running. Singapore's Government Technology Agency said government emails were down.
Hong Kong aluminum firm owner Danny Lau said his company's Outlook accounts could not receive updates from US customers. A longer outage could "impact the production timeline," he said.
Comparison to CrowdStrike
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft had likened the outage to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident. He said Microsoft does not believe it faces a cyberattack but "something similar" to an update that "has gone awry."
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft's top executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator.
IDC research on AI returns
The IDC study, commissioned by Microsoft, surveyed more than 5,200 senior IT and business leaders across 28 industries. It focuses on "Frontier Firms," the top 10% of organizations on IDC's AI maturity scale.
Frontier Firms report an average 4x return on AI, against 2.7x for slow adopters, the bottom 30% on the scale. Some 39% of Frontier Firms see returns of 5x or more, versus 4% of slow adopters. Microsoft notes the returns are reported by leaders and show association, not cause.
Only 61% of all organizations are highly confident they can measure AI's business value, versus 93% of Frontier Firms. And while 67% say their workforce highly trusts AI, only 20% have an organization-wide skilling strategy.
"Organizations that scale AI value aren't simply spending more," said Kathy Lange, IDC's Research Director for AI, Data and Automation Software. She said they manage investments, models, agents, governance and skills "as one discipline."
