Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot in 74 countries 🌐💻

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Since November 12, 2026, several Microsoft services have been suffering major disruptions worldwide. Outlook is the hardest hit, but Microsoft Teams and the Copilot AI assistant are affected too. Millions of users are potentially impacted across several regions, and the US company is still working to restore its infrastructure. It has not yet given a precise time for a full return to normal.

The first reports appeared Thursday, shortly after 6:30 p.m., according to the history on Downdetector, a site that tracks outages reported by users. The problem first surfaced in the Americas, then spread. In total, 74 countries across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas are affected. Individuals, businesses, schools and some government agencies that rely daily on Microsoft 365 tools are all feeling it.

Servers at the heart of the failure ⚙️

Microsoft has confirmed the incident. It first blamed “high server load in several regions,” then explained that several servers had unexpectedly gone offline, overloading its operational infrastructure.

The exact root cause is still unclear. Engineers have reportedly pointed to a possible issue with a component that monitors server health. Microsoft says it found no recent change directly tied to the start of the incident. It also says, for now, that it has ruled out a cyberattack, with no sign of malicious activity or intrusion in its systems.

Microsoft scrambles to restore service 🔧

Since the outage began, Microsoft’s teams have been working to limit the disruption and bring affected infrastructure back online. One step has been adding extra virtual servers to boost capacity and ease the pressure on the machines that are still running.

Those first fixes didn’t deliver. Microsoft acknowledged that some changes failed to improve things lastingly. In some cases, servers that had been brought back went down again as soon as new connections reached them.

The company then paused ongoing deployments, rerouted part of the traffic and restarted the affected servers. It is also looking for other ways to spread connections more evenly and fix imbalances in how traffic is handled.

Some improvement was reported in several regions on Friday, November 13. Around 9 a.m., Microsoft cited encouraging signs of stability. By 10 a.m., it said capacity was improving as recovery work continued. But the recovery is still partial: the fixes have yet to be rolled out to every affected region, and Microsoft hasn’t confirmed a full return to normal.

Blocked emails won’t be lost 📧

Outlook remains one of the worst-hit services. For people who can’t open their inbox or send messages, the obvious worry is whether their emails are safe.

On that point, Microsoft clarified at 11:36 a.m. Friday that emails stuck during the outage will not be lost, even if they aren’t showing up in inboxes right now. It also extended the expiry window for sent messages to 48 hours, giving its teams more time to fix things.

There is still no official workaround. Some users report mixed results when switching from the Outlook mobile app to the web version or other Microsoft 365 interfaces. None of this guarantees access.

Businesses and governments struggle 🏢

The fallout goes well beyond individual users. Many organizations depend on Microsoft tools for internal communication, daily operations and dealing with the public.

In the United States, several city governments, including Miami Beach, Austin, Burbank and Pasadena, reported trouble accessing their email. Some can’t process requests and complaints sent by email as usual. In an emergency, they are urging residents to call by phone or use the usual emergency numbers.

In aviation, India’s IndiGo, one of the country’s largest airlines, said its email support was disrupted and told customers to use its website or official app for help.

Hospitals and universities are also reporting difficulties communicating with patients, students and administrative staff. The outage has also hit how some AI assistants connect to Microsoft 365: users of ChatGPT and Claude reported trouble reaching Microsoft services from those tools. The assistants built by OpenAI and Anthropic still work for everything else.

The dependence debate is back 🌐

The incident is a reminder of the risk that comes with a handful of large international companies running so much of the digital world. When widely used infrastructure goes down, the effects can quickly spread to organizations in several countries at once.

The debate centers on how much governments and businesses rely on Microsoft, but also on other major providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). In France, the Cour des comptes, the national public audit body, recently raised the alarm over the state’s heavy use of Microsoft tools. In a report published roughly three weeks before this outage, it estimated that nearly 860,000 workstations were affected in 2026 and called for a gradual move to more open-source alternatives between 2027 and 2031.

It also echoes the global IT outage of July 2024, caused by a faulty update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software. More than eight million Windows devices were hit, and thousands of flights were canceled or delayed.

For Microsoft, the priority now is to stabilize its infrastructure and restore every service. Despite the improvements reported Friday morning, no firm timeline has been given, so users will have to wait a while longer for Outlook, Teams and Copilot to work normally again.

How dependent is your company or organization on Outlook, Teams or Microsoft 365, and what’s your plan B when they go down? Tell us in the comments.