Microsoft has suffered a widespread global outage, disrupting access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services, affecting businesses, government institutions and educational institutions across several countries.
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The disruption began around midday on Thursday, November 12, 2026, in the United States and extended into Friday, leaving users unable to access email accounts, send and receive messages, and use other cloud-based workplace services.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to technical problems affecting server availability and infrastructure capacity, explaining that several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining systems.
Other affected services included SharePoint, while applications and features dependent on Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email platform, experienced significant disruptions. However, some Microsoft 365 features that do not rely on Exchange Online continued to function.
The scale of the incident was reflected in reports recorded by Downdetector, an outage-monitoring platform, which registered more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the peak of the disruption. The figure represents user-submitted reports rather than the confirmed number of affected customers.
The outage also affected businesses, government agencies and schools. In Australia, some businesses reportedly experienced difficulties printing invoices, while certain schools were unable to conduct online classes. Court livestreams were also disrupted, forcing some institutions to rely on alternative communication channels.
The impact extended to the aviation and financial sectors, with email support services used by Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air affected. Some financial firms in Taiwan also experienced disruptions to their fund management activities.
Artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic equally reported problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors, affecting integrations and disrupting some of their tools.
Microsoft said its engineering teams were working to restore the affected infrastructure through several measures, including redirecting traffic away from problematic servers, restarting affected systems, and pausing certain deployments.
However, some recovery attempts proved unsuccessful, as certain servers became unresponsive again after traffic was redirected to them, complicating efforts to restore normal operations.
The company subsequently reported that some affected servers had been restored, while efforts continued to improve infrastructure stability and service capacity.
Microsoft also stated that it did not indicate that malicious activity or a cyberattack was responsible for the disruption.
The latest incident has renewed concerns about the dependence of businesses, governments, and educational institutions on cloud-based technology services, particularly when disruptions involving major infrastructure providers can affect multiple platforms simultaneously.
Previous incidents, including the 2024 CrowdStrike disruption and outages involving education-solutions/">Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, have similarly demonstrated how technical failures at major technology providers can trigger widespread interruptions across the global digital ecosystem.
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