Global Microsoft Outlook Outage Disrupts Millions as Connectivity Fails Worldwide

UPDATE - follow-up to Microsoft 365 outage drags on as company observes 'limited recovery': Microsoft Outlook suffered a major global outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access their email.

What Happened

The disruption quickly spread across the world within the span of an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories according to outage tracker Downdetector. A map posted by Downdetector on X showed that the outage affected users across the Americas, and parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the United States alone, around 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time, while outage reports later dropped to about 37,000 users by 6 pm Eastern Time. The issue also hit other company products including Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

Company Response

Microsoft stated that the disruption was caused by an "elevated load" on its infrastructure across multiple regions. The company said it was working aggressively to reduce the impact by pausing all deployments, moving additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and restarting servers to return them to service. Microsoft initially stated it was investigating reports in the Americas before confirming that service connectivity was affected for users in any region. As the outage dragged on, the company later reported observing "limited recovery" while routing user traffic away from troubled servers and noted that users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect.

Context

Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that includes widely used workplace applications like Outlook and Teams. Large cloud infrastructure systems rely on interconnected server networks that can face sudden capacity strain, leading to widespread disruptions when connectivity errors cascade across multiple regions.