Microsoft Attempts Fix Global Outage as Servers Fail Again
Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and Copilot were disrupted for more than nine hours on Thursday and Friday. Reports on Downdetector peaked near 140,000, and Microsoft said restored servers became unavailable again once traffic returned. The company ruled out a cyber-attack.
Microsoft attempts to fix a global outage that disrupted Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps for more than nine hours on Thursday and Friday, November 13, 2026, after initial fixes failed to restore services. Outage-tracking site Downdetector logged reports of Outlook problems peaking at nearly 140,000 around 18:00 GMT on Thursday.
The company said it had no indication of a cyber-attack. A Microsoft spokesperson said the firm "had no indication of a cyber-attack".
What went wrong
Microsoft said a number of servers were "unexpectedly unavailable", which strained its remaining systems. It later said the servers failed during automated checks. A portion of its infrastructure was "experiencing elevated load", the company said, which was likely contributing to connectivity errors.
It has suggested the cause may be settings applied to the servers that keep Microsoft 365 running. Engineers rolled back updates and limited traffic to affected servers. When fixes were deployed, those servers became unavailable again once traffic returned.
The company warned that restored services "can become unresponsive again" and that customers "in any region" could be affected. As of 3.30am GMT on Friday, Microsoft said its Exchange services, the back end of Outlook email, were hit hardest. Teams chats and meetings were less affected.
Who was affected
Downdetector showed nearly 130,000 reports of issues in 74 countries, hitting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus business services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. The AI assistant Copilot was also affected. Users in the US, Japan and Singapore reported disruption.
Microsoft 365 is a popular online service among businesses. Users may be unable to view certain files or calendar details, the company said. Messaging and online meetings were largely functional, it added.
The outage reached other AI firms. OpenAI said it was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors, in which new connections may be broken. Anthropic said an upstream provider issue was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the outage.
Recovery under way
Microsoft said it was shifting traffic to alternate routes where possible and streamlining the process of bringing remaining servers back online. It is also assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates could speed recovery.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," the company said. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president of Copilot, wrote on X: "We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue."
Last month Microsoft reported a separate outage of its Azure cloud platform that affected its productivity tools and companies worldwide.
