Microsoft outages kick out users around the world

According to DownDetector, 140,000 people from 74 countries reported issues with Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and the Microsoft 365 suite from 6pm on 12 November 2026.

Users have experienced a range of problems, with many not able to access emails, messages, or calendar details.

The outage reportedly “isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” according to a Microsoft 365 Status X post.

Reuters reported that the outage, which has stretched beyond 12 hours, is one of the company’s worst outages.

Alongside governmental agencies around the world, the list of those affected also includes medical services, police forces, airlines, trading firms, insurance companies, and third-party AI providers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

On its X account, Microsoft 365 Status stated: “We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors… We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service.

Its most recent post said: “We’ve made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored. We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue. Our focus is extending these recovery actions across remaining affected infrastructure while continuing stabilisation and adding capacity to improve consistency.”

Microsoft’s Copilot recently revealed it is ending support for the AI assistant’s functionality on all TVs this year. Discover more here.