Microsoft Races to Fix Global Outage Hitting Outlook, Teams, Copilot
Microsoft said it was working to restore servers after a global outage hit Outlook, Teams and Copilot for more than five hours. Nearly 130,000 users reported problems at the peak, and Australia activated a digital resilience agreement with the company.
Microsoft said on Thursday, November 12, 2026, that it was "aggressively pursuing" a fix for a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services for more than five hours.
Down Detector, a site that tracks outages, showed nearly 130,000 reports of access problems around 1pm ET. Reports fell to about 13,000 five hours later, but many users still could not send or receive email or load their inboxes.
What Microsoft says went wrong
Microsoft said a large number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable" after failing automated health checks. It later said a process on the affected servers that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed and stopped processing requests.
The company said it had paused all deployments, was moving traffic off the affected infrastructure and was restarting servers. It also began reverting a recent network configuration change that matched the start of the problem.
Microsoft said it was testing a configuration fix on a subset of servers before applying it more widely. It gave no estimated time for full restoration. A spokesperson said the company "had no indication of a cyber attack".
Servers it had restored stayed stable so far, Microsoft said. It added that users may see a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect.
Wider fallout
The outage also hit connectors that OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services use to link with Microsoft 365. OpenAI said new connections may be broken and tools may not work as expected. Anthropic said an upstream provider was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government had activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft to get appropriate priority for Australian interests. He said he was briefed by national cyber security coordinator Michelle McGuinness and Microsoft. "They do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event," he said.
Queensland Health said there were "no known" clinical impacts and that hospitals could be reached by phone. Queensland Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek said teaching and learning systems were unaffected, though administration and Outlook functions were delayed.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT University, said the outage appeared to affect the network layer. When part of a server pool fails, he said, the remaining servers become overloaded and "you end up with a cascading problem".
Gregory said companies should test configuration changes more thoroughly before deploying them, and that businesses relying on cloud services should keep backup options.
Microsoft said earlier it had restored Teams problems in North America, though some users still reported connectivity issues. The company said it was still working to return affected servers to service.
