Source : Associated Press
REDMOND, November 13, 2026 – A widespread outage in Microsoft 365 has left users around the world unable to rely on Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other cloud services, after the company said a large number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable and had pushed extra load onto the systems that remained.
The Associated Press, The Guardian and other outlets reported that the disruption became obvious on Thursday afternoon in the United States, Friday morning in Australia. Down Detector, an independent outage tracker, recorded a spike of nearly 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook just after 1pm Eastern Time, and said new reports later fell from that peak. Microsoft first indicated that the issue was concentrated on Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas, then said it might affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region. The company has been tracking the Exchange trouble as incident EX1550543 and a broader advisory, MO1550821, covering Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR, among other services.
Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load”, which was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”, and that a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” after failing automated health checks. It later said it was not a surge in ordinary user traffic that caused the load, and that it was testing a configuration change, redistributing connections, moving traffic off the affected infrastructure and restarting the stricken servers. A subsequent update said an alternative health-check method had allowed a subset of servers to return to service, and that the change was being applied more widely, with an automated recovery process being prepared to detect and restart unresponsive machines.
Users reported being unable to send or receive email, load inboxes, or use calendars, through Outlook on the web, desktop and mobile, and through connection methods used by third-party clients. Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot were also named in incident reports. The US state of Massachusetts told staff that its email and other Microsoft services were unavailable. OpenAI said it was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors, and Anthropic said an upstream provider issue was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. Those company statements were reported by Australian Broadcasting Corporation as the outage continued.
Microsoft’s own status page still listed service degradation for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as the investigation continued, while saying that Azure itself had no concurrent issue. The company has not, in the updates described here, given a firm time for a full restoration, and this report does not invent one. Some servers are back, the company says; others are still being brought up, and a small number of configuration changes are being examined as possible contributors.
For offices that start the day in Outlook and Teams, the practical effect has been simple and severe: mail that would not send, chats that would not load, and an assistant that would not answer, until Microsoft’s restarted servers find their place again.
Source : Associated Press, The Guardian and Microsoft’s service health updates, as reported by ABC News.
Source : Associated Press
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