Microsoft Begins Restoring Services After 130,000 Outage Reports
Microsoft began restoring services on Thursday after a global outage hit Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and Copilot for more than five hours. Down Detector logged nearly 130,000 reports at the peak. The company said it had no indication of a cyber attack.
Microsoft begins restoring services after a global outage disrupted Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps for more than five hours on Thursday, November 12, 2026. Down Detector logged nearly 130,000 reports of access problems at the peak.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company "had no indication of a cyber attack".
What users saw
The spike came around 1pm ET, according to Down Detector. Users reported trouble reaching Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. The Copilot AI assistant was also hit.
New reports later fell to around 13,000, five hours after the peak. Many people still said they could not send or receive email, or could not load their inboxes at all.
Microsoft said it had "successfully restored" Teams problems in North America, though some users kept reporting connectivity issues.
What Microsoft said caused it
Microsoft said part of its infrastructure was "experiencing elevated load", which it said was "likely contributing to the connectivity errors". It later said a number of servers were "unexpectedly unavailable" because they failed automated checks, straining the rest of the system.
On X, the company said it was investigating reports of problems reaching Exchange Online mailboxes "through multiple connection methods". Earlier it said it was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact".
One early fix did not hold. Microsoft said restored servers "can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic".
Recovery under way
Microsoft said the servers it had brought back were stable so far. It is shifting traffic to alternate routes where possible and streamlining the restart of the remaining servers.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," the company said. It is also assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates could speed things up.
AI tools and other companies affected
The outage reached connectors that link OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services to Microsoft. OpenAI said new connections may be broken and tools were not working as expected. 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 from the outage.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, said the fault appeared to sit in the network layer. He said losing part of a server pool overloads the rest, creating "a cascading problem". He urged businesses to keep backup options for cloud services.
Last month Microsoft reported a separate outage of its Azure cloud platform that affected its productivity software and industries worldwide.
