Microsoft is battling to restore its Outlook email service after an infrastructure failure disrupted access to its workplace applications across 74 countries and territories.
The outage began on Thursday, November 12, 2026, affecting Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot and disrupting businesses, schools and government institutions.
In an update on Friday, November 13, Microsoft said recovery efforts had improved service availability in some regions but failed to achieve sustained stability.
Engineers were adjusting network traffic, redirecting connections and restoring affected servers to ease pressure on the company’s infrastructure.
Microsoft traced the disruption to the unexpected unavailability of some servers, which shifted traffic to the remaining systems and overwhelmed a critical connection-handling process. Attempts to restart affected servers encountered further setbacks as some became unresponsive after returning to service.
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The outage also disrupted public and commercial activities. Japanese government services experienced IT difficulties, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court warned of delays in email correspondence and administrative transactions. Businesses and schools in Australia also reported problems processing invoices and conducting online classes.
Downdetector, an outage-monitoring platform, recorded complaints across 74 countries and territories within approximately an hour. Outlook reports in the United States exceeded 130,000 on Thursday.
Microsoft said it had found no evidence of a cyberattack or deliberate interference and was continuing efforts to restore its infrastructure. It promised a detailed report on the incident and corrective measures after resolving the disruption.
The outage recalls a November 25, 2024 incident that also affected Outlook and Teams. Microsoft attributed that disruption to a software change that generated excessive retry requests, placing additional strain on its systems.
The company has not established any link between the two incidents.