Microsoft global outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot in 74 countries

Microsoft’s global outage continued into Friday, November 13, 2026, disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services more than 12 hours after the company first acknowledged widespread technical problems.

Microsoft reported early signs of recovery following infrastructure restarts, software patches and traffic optimization measures. However, services remained unstable across multiple regions, affecting businesses, government agencies, healthcare providers and financial institutions.

• Microsoft’s global outage affected Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Microsoft 365 services, with disruption reports spanning 74 countries and territories.
• The incident interrupted government communications, airline customer support, banking operations and healthcare services across Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific.
• Microsoft reported limited initial recovery followed by improved service stability, but had not confirmed a full resolution or disclosed the root cause.

The disruption was reported across 74 countries and territories within approximately an hour, according to outage-monitoring platform Downdetector. Microsoft said it had found no evidence of malicious activity behind the incident.

Microsoft outage continues as recovery efforts show limited progress

Microsoft said its engineering teams were monitoring server availability and infrastructure performance across affected regions, assessing whether software patches were operating correctly following system restarts.

The company initially described its recovery efforts as having achieved only limited results.

“At this point, we have observed marginal success,” Microsoft said in an early Friday update on its service health platform.

Approximately 30 minutes later, Microsoft reported improved results from traffic optimization measures intended to stabilize services and increase available capacity.

The company said it had observed “positive results for service stability and increased capacity” following its latest interventions.

Microsoft confirmed that it was not aware of malicious activity causing the disruption and said the incident would remain a priority until services were fully restored.

The company plans to publish a post-incident report detailing the root cause and corrective measures once the outage is resolved.

The disruption began on Thursday, November 12, initially affecting Microsoft email services before spreading to other business applications.

Microsoft acknowledged that some of its mitigation measures had not worked as expected, extending the recovery period.

Outlook, Teams and Copilot disruptions affect millions of users

Microsoft 365 applications are used by more than 430 mn people worldwide, making the outage particularly significant for organizations that depend on cloud-based communications and productivity software.

Outlook email, Microsoft Teams collaboration tools and Copilot AI services were among the affected products. OneDrive access was also disrupted for some users.

Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports in the US at the peak of the disruption and approximately 43,000 Outlook-related reports around 07:00 GMT on Friday.

These figures represent user-submitted incident reports rather than the total number of affected customers. The number of people experiencing problems could therefore be substantially higher.

More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot, according to the company’s published figures.

The outage also affected other technology providers. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems associated with the Microsoft disruption.

For companies using multiple Microsoft services, the incident interfered with email communications, virtual meetings, customer correspondence and access to business documents.

Microsoft’s 430 mn Microsoft 365 users represent its wider customer base, not a confirmed count of people directly affected by the outage.

Microsoft had not provided a definitive figure for the number of impacted users.

Microsoft outage disrupts UK government, NHS and Parliament

The outage affected public services across the UK, including Parliament, police forces, NHS healthcare providers and pharmacies.

Members of Parliament reported losing access to Microsoft products through parliamentary accounts. A parliamentary spokesperson confirmed that alternative communication arrangements had been introduced to allow parliamentary business to continue.

The UK Parliament said Microsoft email disruptions were affecting its network, although alternative arrangements allowed the House of Commons to maintain its scheduled business.

The UK government said it was working with Microsoft to assess the effects on public services and had contingency plans intended to minimize disruption.

Defence Minister Luke Pollard called for greater resilience in essential technology systems, emphasizing the need for faster recovery when outages occur.

Several police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester Police and South Wales Police, reported problems with online reporting systems.

The Metropolitan Police advised residents to use telephone services for urgent matters, including 101 for non-emergency reports and 999 for emergencies.

Healthcare services also faced operational difficulties. NHS GP Tim Frank, based in Cornwall, said email access had been unavailable overnight and into Friday morning, affecting communication between primary care providers.

The National Pharmacy Association warned that disruptions to NHS email systems could delay prescription processing and communication between pharmacies, GP practices and patients.

Some healthcare providers distributed alternative telephone contact details to maintain essential communications.

Global Microsoft outage affects banks, airlines and businesses

The disruption spread across multiple industries, affecting organizations that rely on Microsoft 365 for internal coordination and external customer communications.

Several airlines reported problems with email-based customer support, while US municipal governments advised residents to contact public offices by telephone.

At least one US company postponed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the disruption.

Financial institutions, airlines and public agencies reported communication failures, with some organizations switching to telephone calls and other contingency arrangements.

In Hong Kong, employees at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs reported workplace disruption extending into Friday’s lunch period.

An executive at an Indian brokerage firm described difficulties contacting clients, illustrating the effect on financial services companies dependent on email communication.

Banks also warned customers to remain alert to phishing attempts and fraudulent messages exploiting the outage.

The incident affected technology companies using Microsoft infrastructure and integrations. OpenAI and Anthropic reported service problems linked to the disruption.

The outage extended beyond Microsoft’s own applications, affecting organizations and software services dependent on Microsoft 365 integrations.

The range of affected industries demonstrated how interruptions to shared cloud infrastructure can interfere with otherwise unrelated business operations.

Microsoft outage hits Japan, Australia and other Asia-Pacific markets

Government agencies and businesses across Asia-Pacific experienced significant disruption as the outage continued into Friday.

Japan’s government reported problems with its shared IT platform, forcing some public services to return temporarily to paper-based processes.

Courts in the Philippines experienced delays, while Australian schools, courts and government departments also reported service interruptions.

Japan’s government introduced manual procedures for some affected services, while Australian public-sector organizations reported problems with email and Microsoft applications.

Australia’s federal police and intelligence agencies acknowledged disruptions, although officials indicated that the main impact was related to email communications.

The incident also affected education providers. Teachers reported difficulty accessing emails, cloud documents and learning materials stored in Microsoft services.

Some employees retained access to local teaching resources but could not retrieve files from OneDrive or communicate through their usual accounts.

The disruption affected operational communications across Asia-Pacific rather than being limited to individual users experiencing login problems.

Microsoft outage raises questions about cloud service resilience

The scale of the disruption prompted renewed attention to how businesses and public institutions maintain operations when widely used cloud services become unavailable.

Organizations dependent on Microsoft 365 found themselves unable to rely on their normal email, calendar and collaboration platforms.

Some shifted to telephone communications, manual processing and alternative messaging arrangements. Others experienced delays because their customers, suppliers or internal teams used the same affected systems.

With more than 430 mn Microsoft 365 users worldwide, even a partial infrastructure failure can affect communications across numerous industries and countries.

The incident also exposed practical limitations in emergency communications. Organizations that publish only email addresses for customer support or media inquiries can become difficult to contact when their email systems fail.

Microsoft attributed some of the ongoing difficulties to server capacity and infrastructure performance, but had not established a definitive root cause in the updates described.

Microsoft said it would publish a post-incident report addressing the underlying cause and additional protective measures after the incident was mitigated.

The company’s recovery efforts included traffic optimization, infrastructure restarts and verification of software patches. Although the initial improvements were limited, subsequent updates reported better stability and increased capacity.

Microsoft’s service status page subsequently displayed all products as operational, indicating an improvement beyond the earlier partial-recovery reports.