Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook and Teams

Microsoft Outlook suffered a major global outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access their email.

Impact And Scale

The disruption quickly spread across the world within an hour, affecting Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories according to the outage tracker Downdetector. A map posted by Downdetector on X showed that users across the Americas, and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa faced connectivity issues. In the United States alone, about 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time, which is 1800 GMT. Besides Outlook, the outage also hit other company products including Teams, Copilot, and the broader Microsoft 365 cloud-based subscription service.

Company Response

Microsoft stated that the disruption was caused by an elevated load on its infrastructure across multiple regions. The company worked to reduce the impact by pausing all deployments, shifting extra traffic away from the affected servers, and restarting servers to bring them back online. Outage reports eventually dropped to about 37,000 users by 6 pm Eastern Time, or 2300 GMT. Microsoft later reported observing limited recovery as it continued trying to route user traffic away from troubled servers.

Context

Cloud-based productivity suites like Microsoft 365 form the digital backbone for workplaces and schools across the globe. When a core infrastructure component fails, the sudden loss of access can stall everyday communication and operations for millions of people worldwide.