Microsoft Restores Microsoft 365 After Global Outage of More Than 24 Hours, Blames Network Capacity Upgrade

Microsoft said on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, that it had fully restored its Microsoft 365 services, ending a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other workplace tools for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours. "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the company said in a post on X, the Associated Press reported.

The disruption was one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second affecting its 365 services this year, DW reported. Reports of problems began climbing at around 17:25 GMT on Thursday, Nov. 12, according to network diagnostics company Ookla, the parent of outage tracker Downdetector.

Cause attributed to a network upgrade

Microsoft said the incident was "a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents." The company said it "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change," Moneycontrol reported. "We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said, adding that it takes the trust customers place in its services "extremely seriously."

Microsoft had earlier traced the problem to several servers that became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks, which pushed extra traffic onto the remaining infrastructure and caused elevated loads and connection errors. Engineers restarted servers, redistributed traffic and reversed recent configuration changes, but some of those steps did not produce sustained recovery, according to Moneycontrol. The company chose a gradual restoration, validating stability at each stage before bringing more infrastructure back online.

The outage specifically affected features tied to Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email and scheduling service, while applications not connected to it kept working, according to a Reuters report published by CNA. Organizations that host Microsoft services on their own servers rather than in the cloud were somewhat spared.

Recovery and email backlog

Recovery began in parts of the Asia-Pacific region at about 10 p.m. Australian Eastern Daylight Time on Friday before extending to Europe and North America, iTnews reported. Microsoft extended its usual email timeout window to 48 hours "to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up," and iTnews found that emails scheduled during the outage arrived hours out of order. Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government had activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft to secure "appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests."

The European Patent Office said Microsoft's public service-health page returned to normal on the morning of Nov. 14, while warning that some messages sent during the disruption could still face residual delays as queues were processed. Microsoft has said it will publish a full post-incident report with the root cause and the defensive measures it plans to take once its review is complete.

Scale of the disruption

Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking at nearly 20,000 a minute, more than 1,500 times normal levels, according to Ookla. The outage affected government agencies in countries including Singapore, Australia, Japan and the United States, caused delays at trading firms and prompted airlines to warn customers of slower communications.

In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service said some local services turned to paper records, and London's Metropolitan Police said its ability to take some crime reports online was affected. Exchange operator Euronext reported email disruptions, insurer Aviva activated backups for its earnings calls and shipping company Maersk warned customers of delayed updates. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its results to Nov. 16, and Richemont briefly delayed its first-half results on Friday. At some Taiwanese financial firms, one company canceled a bond repurchase and another used fax to confirm trades, sources told Reuters.

Shares and insurance costs

Microsoft shares closed little changed at $523.88 on Friday and have gained roughly 8% this year, according to the Reuters report. Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses from the incident at $300 million to $500 million, below the $400 million to $1.5 billion estimated for the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that crashed more than 8 million Windows computers.

Microsoft also had a 365 outage in January this year and in October last year, and last month reported an Azure cloud outage that affected its productivity software, Reuters noted. DW reported that the Microsoft problems were not believed to be connected to the communications failure that led to a nationwide ground stop of U.S. flights on Friday.