Microsoft is facing a major global service disruption that has left millions of users struggling to access Outlook email, Microsoft Teams and other applications within its Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
The outage, which began on Thursday, November 12, 2026, affected businesses across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, with disruptions extending into Friday.
Other affected services included SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.
The impact went beyond workers being unable to check emails or attend virtual meetings. Businesses struggled to process invoices, schools experienced difficulties running online classes, while some government operations and court services also reported interruptions.
According to outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, reports of Outlook problems peaked at approximately 138,000, highlighting the scale of the disruption.
Microsoft initially attributed the problem to elevated infrastructure loads across multiple regions.
In an update, the company said “we’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.”
Microsoft added that it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”
Recovery efforts face setbacks
Microsoft’s attempts to restore services encountered difficulties, with some servers becoming unresponsive again after being brought back online.
The company paused deployments, redirected traffic away from affected infrastructure and began restarting servers to restore capacity.
However, its initial recovery efforts did not deliver the expected results.
In a subsequent update, Microsoft acknowledged that “our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief.”
The company later reported some progress, saying it had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected to its services.
Microsoft also ruled out a cyberattack as the cause, with executive Charles Lamanna confirming there was no indication that the disruption resulted from malicious or cybersecurity activity.
Businesses confront the cost of digital dependence
The incident has renewed concerns about the dependence of businesses on a handful of technology providers for everyday operations.
Financial traders, for instance, experienced difficulties accessing emails used for transaction confirmations and authentication, forcing some to rely on telephone calls and messaging platforms.
The outage also raises questions about business continuity, cloud infrastructure resilience and the risks associated with relying on a single technology ecosystem.