Last updated: Friday, November 13, 2026, 6:30 a.m. ET. The Microsoft outage is not fully resolved. Microsoft reports gradual recovery and has given no time for full restoration.
A global Microsoft outage that began on Thursday, November 12 is still disrupting Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot more than 17 hours after Microsoft first confirmed it. Email is the worst hit. Microsoft says traffic is being restored in stages and mailbox access is improving, but service remains uneven from one region and one account to the next.
Is Microsoft down right now?
Partly, yes. As of early Friday morning Eastern time, Microsoft describes "early stabilization and capacity improvements", and some users report that Outlook has come back. Others still cannot open their mailbox. If Outlook is not working for you, the problem is almost certainly on Microsoft's side and not on your device.
You can check the live incident on the Microsoft service health page. Admins can follow incident IDs EX1550543 (Exchange Online) and MO1550821 (wider Microsoft 365) in the admin center.
Which Microsoft services are affected?
The outage centers on Exchange Online, the system behind Outlook email. Anything that leans on a mailbox went down with it. Microsoft's incident notice lists:
Outlook and Exchange Online: web, desktop and mobile mailbox access
Microsoft Teams: mainly calendars and scheduling, with chat and meetings working for many users
Microsoft 365 Copilot: may fail to load or reach email, calendar and files
SharePoint Online, Planner and To Do
Security and admin tools: Defender XDR, Defender for Office 365, Intune, Purview and parts of Power BI
Azure is not part of this incident. Downdetector showed a spike in Azure reports, but Microsoft's notice does not list it and the Azure status page stayed clear.
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft has not confirmed a root cause. Here is what it has said so far:
Servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed extra load onto the rest. A surge in traffic was not the trigger.
On the affected servers, the process that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed and the servers stopped handling requests.
Servers that were restarted could fail again once traffic returned, which is why early fixes did not hold.
Overnight, Microsoft began rolling back a recent network configuration change that lines up with the start of the outage. It has not said that change caused it.
Microsoft also says it has found no sign of a cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, an executive vice president at Microsoft, repeated that publicly and apologized to customers for the disruption.
Microsoft outage timeline
All times Eastern.
Thursday, about 11:17 a.m.: third-party trackers log the first Exchange Online failures.
Shortly before 1 p.m.: Microsoft says it is investigating mailbox access problems in the Americas.
1:07 p.m.: Microsoft warns the issue can affect users in any region.
4:41 p.m.: the affected list grows to include Intune, Defender for Office 365, Purview and Power BI.
Thursday evening: Microsoft pauses deployments, moves traffic and restarts servers, then identifies the overloaded secure-connection process.
Friday, about 2 a.m.: restarts show positive results, but Microsoft says there is no sustained recovery yet.
About 4:15 a.m.: Microsoft extends its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages.
About 6 a.m.: Microsoft says traffic is being gradually restored, with mailbox access and delayed email processing improving.
How big is the outage?
Large by any measure. Downdetector told NBC News that reports peaked at 19,650 per minute across five Microsoft services, against fewer than 15 on a normal Thursday, and that the outage reached 74 countries within an hour. Outlook alone drew well over 100,000 reports in the US at its peak.
The effects reached well past office inboxes. CNN reports that US city governments lost email and at least one company postponed its quarterly earnings call. In Canada, hospitals reported disruption to appointment systems and Via Rail warned passengers that trip emails might not arrive.
What to do if Outlook is not working
Leave your setup alone. Resetting passwords, rebuilding your Outlook profile or reinstalling Office will not fix a server-side outage.
Try another route in. Access varies by connection method, so if desktop Outlook fails, try Outlook on the web or mobile, and the reverse.
Expect delayed mail, not lost mail. Microsoft says it is prioritizing delayed messages during recovery. For anything time-critical, confirm by phone.
Use a channel that does not run on Microsoft 365. Do not rely on Teams alone to tell your team that Teams is down.
Watch for phishing. Outages attract fake "fix your account" emails. Microsoft will not ask you to sign in through a link to restore service.
Admins: log the downtime. Service credits under the Microsoft 365 SLA are not automatic. Record the times and claim with the incident IDs once service is stable.
What this means if your work runs on AI tools
Copilot going down with Outlook is the detail worth noticing. An AI assistant that is wired into one suite inherits that suite's failures. When the mailbox layer broke, the assistant that reads your mail and calendar broke with it.
The practical lesson is to know what each tool in your workflow depends on. Keep a fallback way to reach your team, keep critical files available offline, and avoid routing every job through a single login. That applies to every vendor, including us. MagicShot is not part of Microsoft 365, so image and video work there does not depend on Outlook or Teams being up, but the same question is worth asking of any platform you rely on.
We will update this article as Microsoft confirms full recovery and publishes its post-incident review.
Sources: Microsoft 365 Status and service health notices, ABC News, CNN, NBC News, CNBC, CTV News, Downdetector.
