Global Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams, and Workplace Services Worldwide
November 12, 2026 — A widespread Microsoft 365 outage knocked out email, messaging, and cloud productivity tools for hundreds of thousands of users and businesses across the globe on Thursday, stretching late into the evening as engineers worked to bring overwhelmed servers back online.
The disruption began around 11:17 a.m. Eastern Time, immediately impacting core workplace services including Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Microsoft Copilot. By early afternoon, user-submitted fault reports on the outage tracking site Downdetector surged to roughly 130,000, with businesses, government agencies, and individual users reporting an inability to load inboxes or send and receive emails.
Cause of the Disruption
In technical status updates issued Thursday evening, Microsoft narrowed down the root cause to a server-level bottleneck. According to the company, the process responsible for establishing secure connections on affected servers became overwhelmed, causing those machines to fail automated health checks and stop processing requests.
Microsoft also noted that a recent configuration change correlated with the start of the outage and confirmed engineers were rolling back that update. Government officials in affected regions, including Australia—where the outage disrupted state administrative email systems early Friday local time—confirmed that Microsoft does not believe the incident was caused by a cyberattack.
Recovery Efforts Underway
To stabilize the network, Microsoft redistributed connection traffic across its global infrastructure, added server capacity where possible, and began restarting offline servers. Company officials stated they were prioritizing life, safety, and government systems during the restoration process.
While incident reports dropped significantly from their afternoon peak by Thursday night, Microsoft warned that residual instability—particularly for services connecting to Exchange Online—remained ongoing. The company has not yet provided a definitive timeline for full global restoration.
