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Friday 13 Nov 2026
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A global Microsoft 365 outage has left users unable to open their Outlook inboxes and disrupted parts of Teams and Copilot. (Photo/Reuters)
A global Microsoft 365 outage has left users unable to open their Outlook inboxes and disrupted parts of Teams and Copilot, as server failures that hit during the US working day on Thursday continued into Friday morning across Asia and Australia.
Early in the outage, Microsoft warned on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X that the problem “may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”.
In the US alone, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems at around 0100 PM Eastern time on Thursday.
What went wrong?
Several servers unexpectedly went offline, Microsoft said on X, leaving fewer machines to handle the usual volume of traffic. As the remaining servers came under strain, users began having trouble connecting to Exchange Online, the service that manages work email, calendars and contacts.
“We found a core process on affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, causing capacity loss,” Microsoft said in a later post on X.
In a service update carried by ABC News, the company explained that the process establishes secure connections. When it became overloaded, the servers stopped responding to requests. Microsoft said it had seen no indication that malicious activity had caused the outage, according to AP.
Why did an email outage affect Teams and Copilot?
Outlook relies on Exchange Online to open a mailbox. Teams and Copilot also use it for some features, so the same failure could disrupt one part of an app while leaving another available, according to Reuters, citing Microsoft’s service notice.
The elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional.
Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.
In Singapore, for example, the outage disrupted government email, but public officials could still use Teams for internal communications, the country’s Government Technology Agency told CNA.
The disruption also affected tools outside Microsoft’s own apps. OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems connecting their AI assistants to Microsoft 365.
Which countries reported disruptions?
In the United States, the House of Representatives said the outage affected its users and that its engineers were working with Microsoft. In Canada, Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench warned that documents filed electronically could take longer to reach the court and be processed.
In India, Air India temporarily rerouted its email so passenger enquiries could still reach the airline. IndiGo said it had trouble receiving enquiries by email but kept other support channels open. Both airlines said flights continued as usual, according to AP.
In the Philippines, the Supreme Court said the outage disrupted some of its work, including replies to emails. Japan also reported disruption to government IT systems. In Australia, the federal police and the country’s intelligence agency were among the organisations affected, Reuters reported.
For businesses, the consequences crossed time zones. In Hong Kong, Danny Lau, who runs an aluminium company, told AP his staff could no longer receive updates from US customers. A prolonged outage, he said, could delay production.
In Taiwan, a financial firm cancelled a scheduled bond repurchase transaction, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Why did it take so long to restore access?
Microsoft said on X that it paused new deployments, redirected traffic, and restarted affected servers. Engineers also found another way to check whether servers were ready to handle requests, allowing some machines to come back online. The difficulty came when users began reconnecting.
“The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic,” Microsoft said on X.
Engineers temporarily limited the types of connections reaching some servers and began rebuilding others with an earlier configuration to see whether they would stay online.
About 12 hours into the disruption, Microsoft said some regions had seen a partial recovery, but the improvements had yet to last.
We're engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact, address our current blocker, and returning portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/pYdahqxDv3 if the admin center is not available to you.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026
How did users react?
Some users on X saw the Outlook outage as an early start to the weekend. Picking up on Microsoft’s description of its servers as “unresponsive”, @itshotoutsidern asked, “can you keep the servers "unresponsive" until 4PM Friday? sorry if you don't do requests.”
By Friday morning, Uday (@AIVerseUday) was ready to sign off: “Close your laptops and enjoy your day. We will meet on Monday.
Others rewrote a familiar email greeting.
“Yesterday: ‘I hope this email finds you well.’ Today: ‘I hope this email finds you,’” wrote Douglas A. Boneparth.
Yesterday: “I hope this email finds you well.” Today: “I hope this email finds you.”
— Douglas A. Boneparth (@dougboneparth) November 12, 2026
Microsoft’s updates drew sharper comments. “These posts have been a 12-hour masterclass in saying ‘we have no idea what’s broken’ in 20 different ways,” wrote @Hawk_SB_48_49.
Another user, @Brush5179, joked about job cuts: “They spent 9 hours trying to hire back the 8000 employees that understood how the program worked.”
@MSFT365Status They spent 9 hours trying to hire back the 8000 employees that understood how the program worked.
— BusinessBrush5179 (@Brush5179) November 13, 2026
Rethinking reliance on Microsoft
Few customers could realistically switch away from Microsoft overnight, Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, told Reuters. But repeated outages, he said, could make IT departments think twice before entrusting more of their operations to a single provider.
One German state had already made the switch before this outage.
In October 2025, Schleswig-Holstein completed a six-month move from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to the open-source alternatives Open-Xchange and Thunderbird, transferring more than 40,000 government mailboxes.
The state’s digitalisation minister said the aim was to reduce dependence on large technology companies and give the administration greater control over its systems.
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Source: TRT
