Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams, Businesses

A major global outage affecting Microsoft services has disrupted email communication and other digital operations across several countries, leaving businesses, government agencies and individual users struggling to access important online tools.

The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, 2026, has continued into Friday, with Microsoft working to restore affected services after its initial recovery efforts failed to bring all systems back online.

Among the services affected are Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Some users have been unable to open their email inboxes, send or receive messages, while others have experienced difficulties accessing documents and collaboration tools.

Microsoft said the problem affected its Exchange Online infrastructure, which supports email services across Microsoft 365. The company reported that some servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure and causing connection problems.

The outage attracted widespread attention after Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions, recorded nearly 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook in the United States at the peak of the disruption on Thursday. Reports also came from users in several other countries.

The company has since reported encouraging signs of recovery, saying service availability and email delivery performance were improving across parts of its affected infrastructure.

Microsoft also reported improvements in North America and Europe, alongside positive recovery signals in the Asia-Pacific region. However, it warned that some customers could continue experiencing intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery while engineers worked on the remaining affected systems.

The disruption has also affected government operations and public services. In the United Kingdom, the Metropolitan Police experienced difficulties with online crime reporting, although its emergency response to calls remained unaffected. The National Health Service said some local services had turned to alternative IT systems and paper records.

Several businesses also reported operational challenges. European exchange operator Euronext experienced email disruptions, while British insurer Aviva activated backup arrangements for earnings calls. Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers about delayed updates.

In Asia, Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India reported problems with their email support services. However, Air India and IndiGo said their flight operations were not affected, with alternative communication channels helping them maintain essential services.

The financial sector also felt the impact. Some Taiwanese financial institutions experienced disruptions to fund management and other operations. One company reportedly cancelled a bond repurchase transaction, while another resorted to using fax machines to confirm financial trades.

The outage extended beyond Microsoft’s own applications. OpenAI and Anthropic also reported difficulties connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, demonstrating how organisations that depend on Microsoft’s infrastructure can experience disruptions even when they are not directly using Outlook or Teams.

Despite the widespread impact, Microsoft said it had no indication that the incident was caused by malicious activity or a cyberattack. Australian Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke also said the information available to his government did not point to a cyberattack.

The precise technical root cause had not been fully established in the updates available on Friday. Microsoft had identified server and infrastructure problems and was applying fixes, but said it would provide a fuller explanation after the incident had been resolved.

The outage has renewed concerns about the growing dependence of businesses, governments and public institutions on a small number of technology companies for essential communication and administrative services.

For organisations that rely heavily on Microsoft 365, the disruption has highlighted the importance of maintaining alternative communication channels, backup systems and procedures that allow critical activities to continue when cloud-based services become unavailable.

Microsoft said it would continue its recovery efforts until all affected services were restored.