Microsoft 365 Outage Enters Second Day, Disrupting Outlook, Teams and Copilot in 74 Countries

A global outage of Microsoft 365 services stretched into a second day on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, leaving many businesses, schools and government offices without reliable access to Outlook email and disrupting Teams and the Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft said it had ruled out a cyberattack but had not yet identified a root cause, and its shares fell about 2% in premarket trading, Dow Jones reported.

Problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, Nov. 12, or 11 a.m. Eastern time, when users started reporting that they could not reach Outlook, Al Jazeera reported. Within about an hour, outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. By Thursday evening, about 140,000 people had reported problems with Outlook, the BBC reported. Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its 365 apps, and Downdetector counts only users who choose to file a report.

What Microsoft has said

Microsoft attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The company said a large number of servers had become "unexpectedly unavailable," shifting traffic to the remaining servers and overloading them, and that the elevated load had not been caused by an increase in traffic. Late on Thursday it reported limited recovery as it tried to route traffic away from affected servers, and later said the changes it applied were not taking effect as expected.

On Friday, Microsoft said it was rolling back a network change but did not say whether that change caused the problem, according to Al Jazeera. In a service health update early Friday, the company said it was reviewing server performance and confirming that patches had been applied and were working after infrastructure reboots. It later reported "early signs of stabilisation" while saying capacity had "not yet returned to normal levels," the BBC reported, and said its priority was reducing email queues and backlogs.

"I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity," Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X late Thursday. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had told him it did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack.

Governments, health services and AI companies affected

Government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted, as were communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and Australia's spy agency and federal police were among the organizations affected, according to Al Jazeera. Japan said its operations were continuing through alternative means of communication.

In the U.K., general practitioner surgeries, pharmacies, police forces and schools reported problems, according to the BBC's live coverage. The National Pharmacy Association warned that prescription waits could be longer, and the U.K. Parliament said alternative communication arrangements were in place. Some property purchases scheduled to complete on Friday were delayed because solicitors could not contact other parties, the BBC reported.

The disruption also reached companies that build on Microsoft's services. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft services that caused some tools not to work as expected, and Anthropic also reported problems, the BBC said.

Gergely Orosz, a former software engineer at Skype and Uber, told the BBC the incident could be the "most disruptive" business email outage "of all time," saying he could not recall a business email outage taking this long to return to normal.

Earlier incidents

It is not Microsoft's first major service failure this year. In January, Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours, which the company blamed on heavy service load combined with reduced capacity during maintenance, and in late August thousands of Outlook users worldwide were locked out of their mailboxes, Al Jazeera reported.

Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery. It has said users may see service return gradually as their apps reconnect rather than all at once.

Market backdrop

The outage came as technology stocks were already under pressure following the resignation of Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang this week. Nasdaq 100 futures were slightly lower before Friday's open, and investors were awaiting October U.S. producer price data, Dow Jones reported.