The Microsoft 365 down is a global outage that began on 12 November: it blocked Outlook email and slowed Teams, Copilot and other services in the suite.
Last updated: 13 November 2026, 15:40 CET
Microsoft’s outage is still ongoing. The Exchange Online incident, which affects the company’s email service, began at 16:17 GMT on 12 November. Since then the problems have never been fully resolved. However, in the early afternoon today Microsoft said it was seeing “encouraging progress” in the recovery.
How big is the Microsoft 365 down
It is one of the widest outages in recent years. According to Downdetector, shortly after 1 p.m. on Thursday (New York time) US users had reported almost 130,000 problems with Outlook. Within about an hour, reports were coming from 74 countries and territories. The potential reach is also huge: Microsoft 365 services are used by 430 million people worldwide.
Which services are affected
The core problem is email. As a result, delays and blocked access on Exchange Online cascade into connected tools such as the Teams calendar, Copilot, Planner, To Do and several admin functions. Microsoft also lists SharePoint Online, Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Purview among the affected services. Still, files stored directly in SharePoint remain accessible, and Teams is not entirely offline.
The outage has also hit people using other apps. For example, Exchange accounts read through other clients, such as Apple Mail, show the same problems, because the disruption sits in Microsoft’s own infrastructure. The same goes for AI: Anthropic and OpenAI reported that Claude and ChatGPT could no longer reach Microsoft 365 services.
Businesses have paid a price too. Dynamics 365 Contact Center was down for just under eight hours on Thursday evening: agents could not log into their workspace, and voice and messaging stopped.
What caused the Microsoft 365 down, according to Microsoft
This was not a cyberattack. According to Microsoft, some servers failed and shifted traffic onto the remaining ones, which then became overloaded. The company said it had paused all deployments, reduced the load on the affected infrastructure and restarted the servers involved. Finally, it promised a post-incident report with the root cause and repair steps once the issue is resolved.
It is not the first incident this year. On 22 January 2026, another outage took down Outlook, Defender and Purview for almost ten hours. We also recently covered the extension of Windows 10 security updates.
What happens to delayed emails
Emails should not be lost. Microsoft extended the email timeout window to 48 hours, so that delayed messages are protected while the backlog clears. Business admins, instead, should follow updates in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Health → Service health, rather than troubleshooting individual devices.
Sources
- Microsoft 365 Status (official X account) and Service health page
- The Washington Post
- MacRumors
- Forbes
- CX Today
- XDA Developers
- Il Fatto Quotidiano
- Fanpage
- Today.it
- Quotidiano Nazionale
- The Register
