Global Microsoft 365 Outage Cuts Off Outlook Email Into a Second Day

A global Microsoft outage cut off Outlook email for users around the world and continued into a second day on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026.^[1] Microsoft said the disruption was not caused by a cybersecurity incident. The company reported early signs of stabilization Friday morning but said service capacity had not returned to normal levels.^[1]

Related: Microsoft Gives AI Agents 60+ SharePoint Tools, Lifting Task Pass Rate to 84.6%.

What happened

Reports that people could not reach Outlook email on the web or in apps began just before 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, Nov. 12.^[2] Microsoft first flagged the issue as affecting the United States and the Americas. It later widened the notice to cover any region.^[3]

The outage affected programs in Microsoft 365, the company’s online suite of workplace tools.^[4] Microsoft listed Teams, SharePoint, the Copilot artificial intelligence tool and the Defender XDR security system as affected. Consumers also lost access to OneDrive storage and Office for the web.^[3]

Access varied by customer. Many users could not send or receive email or view some files and calendar details. Some users were still able to use Teams messaging and online meetings.^[1]

How many people were affected

The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed. The monitoring site Downdetector logged 140,000 reports of Outlook problems from 74 countries on Thursday evening. The true figure is likely higher because Downdetector relies mainly on users reporting problems themselves.^[1]

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, by the company’s own count.^[1]

What Microsoft said about the cause

Microsoft attributed the outage to “elevated load” on part of its infrastructure across multiple regions.^[2] The company said a large number of servers became “unexpectedly unavailable.” That pushed extra traffic onto the remaining servers and strained them.^[1] Microsoft did not explain why the servers went offline.^[3]

“We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible,” Microsoft communications director Ben Hope said in a statement to The Verge.^[2]

By about 6 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, Microsoft said it had begun returning some affected servers to service and was shifting traffic to other pathways. It gave no estimate for full restoration.^[2] The company later said its attempted fixes were “not taking as expected.”^[1] It also warned that restored services could become unresponsive again.^[4]

In an update early Friday, Microsoft said it had completed recovery actions across parts of its infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. The company said mailbox access was improving, some users could still see intermittent issues, and it was extending the work to other regions.^[5]

Who felt the disruption

OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems tied to the outage. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with its connections to Microsoft’s services.^[1] Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States were also affected. Japan’s economy, trade and industry minister said the disruption had a “major impact.”^[5]

In the United Kingdom, doctors’ offices, pharmacies and police forces reported problems. Several large police forces asked the public to phone in reports instead of using online forms.^[6] Sir Ciarán Devane, chief executive of the NHS Alliance, said the outage affected some health service email. “But it appears that all clinical and operational systems are working effectively,” Devane said.^[6]

Heathrow, Manchester and Stansted airports operated as usual.^[6] The Bank of England said all of its critical operations were running normally.^[5]

Electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its third-quarter earnings report from Nov. 12 to Nov. 16, citing business disruptions from the outage.^[4]

What experts said

Gergely Orosz, a former software engineer at Skype and Uber, told the BBC this could be the “most disruptive” business email outage “of all time.”^[1]

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity adviser at ESET, said the incident showed the risk of relying on a small number of providers. “When one big one like this goes down, the knock-on effects are just huge,” Moore told the BBC.^[6]

Earlier Microsoft outages

The disruption follows two other recent incidents. A days-long outage hit Microsoft 365 in September, which Microsoft blamed on a “core authentication configuration” issue.^[3] Microsoft also reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform last month.^[4]

The Boston Report will update this story as Microsoft reports on its recovery. For more technology coverage, see the AI and technology news hub and the AI companies guide.

Sources

1. BBC News: What we know about the global Microsoft outage
2. The Verge: Microsoft Outlook is still down
3. TechCrunch: Microsoft’s Outlook email hit by new outage
4. BBC News: Global Microsoft outage affecting tens of thousands of users
5. The Guardian: Microsoft outage live: UK police, NHS services and schools affected amid disruption affecting millions globally
6. BBC News: GPs, police and pharmacies among UK services affected by Microsoft outage

About the reporter: Theo Lin is an AI reporter covering AI news, technology and science for The Boston Report. This article was produced with AI under our editorial policy. Read our AI and media disclosure.