Microsoft Says 365 Outage Recovery Is Not Taking as Expected

REDMOND, November 13, 2026 – Microsoft is still working to restore Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services on Friday afternoon, after the company said earlier recovery measures were not taking as expected and had not produced a sustained return to normal.

LNA earlier reported the start of the disruption, which began on Thursday in the United States and left users worldwide unable to rely on Exchange Online and related cloud tools. That account, published on Friday morning, set out Microsoft’s first explanation: a large number of servers had failed automated health checks, become unavailable and placed extra load on the systems that remained. The company is tracking the episode under incident notices EX1550543 and MO1550821. This report concerns the recovery effort since then.

At 11.13am Malaysian time, the Microsoft 365 Status account on X said it had “monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected.” It said it was identifying other ways to increase capacity in the face of “sustained traffic management imbalances.”

At 12.36pm, Microsoft said it was adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing traffic and applying “strategic traffic blocking measures.” It added: “We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery, so we’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability.”

A further update at 1.01pm said the company was engaged in “multiple workstreams to alleviate impact, address our current blocker, and returning portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state.”

At 2.12pm, still the latest official public update on X when this draft was prepared, Microsoft said: “We’re continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity.” A more comprehensive account, it said, was available under MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and on its public service health page if the admin centre could not be reached.

That public page, at status.cloud.microsoft, continued to list service degradation for both Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers and for consumer products, saying users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services. The same page said no Azure issues had been detected. Microsoft has not given a time for a full restoration.

On the cause, Microsoft has said the elevated load was not driven by an increase in ordinary user traffic, but by servers that became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks. It later said some machines brought back into service became unresponsive again once they received traffic. The BBC reported that Microsoft has said the outage is not caused by a cyber-security incident. The company has not yet published a full root-cause finding.

Services named in Microsoft’s incident notices include Exchange Online and Outlook, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Defender XDR, Intune, Planner, To Do and Purview. A Microsoft consumer status entry, as reported by Moneycontrol, has also listed Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web. Microsoft has said the disruption may affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region.

Sources: Microsoft 365 Status on X, Microsoft Service Health Status, and the BBC.

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