Microsoft’s Outlook outage, which began on Thursday, spread worldwide and rolled into a second day on Friday — taking Teams, files and documents, and the company’s Copilot AI tools down with it, with recovery still incomplete on Friday morning. Why it matters: this is the kind of failure that shows how much of the working world now runs through one provider’s email, meetings and AI assistant at the same time.
November 13, 2026
What happened
The problems started on Thursday, November 12, initially flagged as affecting Microsoft’s services in the U.S. and the Americas, then quickly spreading around the world. What began as an Outlook email and Teams video conferencing outage developed into a broader meltdown across the company’s cloud services for consumer and business email, files and documents. The outage also knocked out Microsoft’s Copilot AI tools and its Defender security screening software, and prevented system administrators from reaching their internal Intune dashboards. Some users also reported problems accessing their cloud-based Windows computers.
The scale showed up fast in outage reports. Downdetector reports for Outlook peaked at around 130,000 at about 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, with Microsoft 365 reports exceeding 47,000, and reports were logged from 74 countries and territories. On Friday morning the numbers were lower but far from zero — around 11,747 Outlook problems were reported at about 7:11 a.m. ET.
What Microsoft says — and what it has not said
Microsoft has not yet named a cause. The company has said only that the outage involved “a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable,” that an “elevated load across multiple regions” followed, and that it continues to investigate. Changes it made to improve serviceability did not take “as expected,” and the company said it was identifying alternate workstreams to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. In its Friday status update, Microsoft said there was “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
Recovery is happening in phases. Microsoft posted on Friday at 5:28 a.m. ET that recovery actions were ongoing but that capacity had “not yet fully returned to baseline.” At 8:32 a.m. ET it reported broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, while warning that users may still see issues and delayed email delivery. Kentik’s director of internet analysis, Doug Madory, said traffic was returning to Microsoft’s services after about 18 hours of downtime. One distinction worth noting: Microsoft’s Service Health Status page showed no issues detected in Azure, so the core Azure cloud itself was not flagged as down even as Microsoft 365 services degraded.
Why it matters
For anyone whose job runs on Outlook, Teams and Copilot, Thursday and Friday were a live demonstration of single-provider risk: when the servers went, the email, the meetings, the files and the AI assistant all went together. Microsoft’s last major incident was in September, when a days-long outage hit its cloud services and the company blamed a “core authentication configuration” issue. This time, the harder question is recovery speed — engineers initially could not find the cause of servers failing in Microsoft’s own data centers, and a full day later the company was still working through phased restoration with no root cause published.
Frequently asked questions
Is Microsoft still down on Friday, November 13?
Partly. As of Friday morning on the U.S. East Coast, Outlook had begun to recover and some emails were trickling in, but Microsoft said capacity had not fully returned to baseline and users could still face delayed email and intermittent problems.
Which Microsoft services were affected?
Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 services for email, files and documents, plus Copilot AI tools, Defender security screening and Intune admin dashboards. Microsoft’s status page showed no issues detected in Azure.
Was the Microsoft outage a cyberattack?
Microsoft said on Friday that there was “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.” It has not yet published a root cause.
When did the outage start?
On Thursday afternoon, November 12, first in the U.S. and the Americas, before spreading worldwide.
Sources: TechCrunch, USA Today