Emails that did not arrive and meetings that would not start: that was the experience of users around the world from Thursday, 12 November 2026, after a wide outage of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook and Teams, with effects still felt on Friday.
On Thursday morning, Microsoft logged a first Teams incident that lasted about an hour, from 9:45 to 10:53 am Eastern Time, and later said it was fully resolved.
At 1:26 pm ET (9:26 pm in Saudi Arabia), the larger outage began. In an advisory to administrators, Microsoft confirmed that customers might be unable to connect to several services, including Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR.
Over the following hours, the company said the elevated load was not caused by more traffic but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, after a core process on them became overwhelmed. In a later statement reported by CNBC, it traced the disruption to "an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade."
By Thursday evening in New York, Microsoft was returning some affected servers to service. On Friday it said services were gradually recovering and extended the retry window for delayed emails to 48 hours so messages would not be lost.
On Friday, 13 November, Microsoft apologised. "We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," the company said, adding that it had not detected any malicious activity. Email queues were approaching normal levels, though some users could still see intermittent issues. Microsoft has not given a time for full recovery and said it will publish a full report once its review is complete.
Source: Microsoft, CNBC, BleepingComputer
