Microsoft 365 Outage Over: Outlook and Teams Fully Recovered After Day-Long Global Disruption

Microsoft says its services have fully recovered after the global Microsoft 365 outage that knocked Outlook, Teams and Copilot offline for more than a day. The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, 2026, left businesses, schools, hospitals and government offices around the world struggling to send email, join meetings and get work done — and it ended only after a slow, staged recovery that stretched into Saturday.

In a final status update published on Saturday, November 14, Microsoft confirmed that services across the previously affected environments had fully recovered and that the backlog of delayed email had been processed. The company recorded the incident as remediated, with an end time of Friday, November 13, at 4:10 p.m. UTC.

What went wrong

Microsoft has now named the cause. The incident was introduced by a fault during an earlier network capacity upgrade, the company said, and it surfaced after a recent network change. A process responsible for establishing secure connections on affected servers became overwhelmed, and servers began failing automated health checks and dropping offline. As user traffic shifted onto the servers that were still running, the load cascaded and more of them stopped responding.

The company was emphatic about what the outage was not. "The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change," Microsoft said, adding that it was "not related to cyber or AI / agents." Microsoft executive vice president Charles Lamanna said there was no indication of malicious activity, and the company apologised to customers and partners for the disruption.

Reporting during the outage added one unconfirmed detail: The Verge's Tom Warren reported that his sources linked the disruption to configuration changes in Azure Virtual Network, Microsoft's cloud networking service. Microsoft has not confirmed that detail, and a full post-incident report is still to come.

A slow, staged recovery

The outage began on Thursday afternoon, when Microsoft opened the Exchange Online incident at around 4:17 p.m. UTC. Within about an hour, outage reports had spread across 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR were among the services hit, along with Planner, To Do, Intune and OneDrive.

Recovery did not go smoothly at first. Around 10 p.m. ET on Thursday, Microsoft said some of its attempts to improve serviceability "didn't work as hoped." Engineers froze routine software deployments and configuration changes, rerouted traffic onto alternative infrastructure and tried a different health-check method so restarted servers could safely rejoin the network. Some servers that came back online became unresponsive again once traffic was redirected to them.

By 2:45 a.m. on Friday, the company was seeing positive results from its latest traffic optimisation work. Later that morning it reported continued recovery across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained gains across much of Europe and encouraging signals in Asia Pacific. By Friday afternoon, Microsoft said the underlying issue had been addressed and it was seeing broad recovery and stability — but it deliberately restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage because of the scale of demand. "While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," the company said.

Who was affected

The outage reached far beyond office workers. Emergency services, government departments, the US House of Representatives, court systems and schools were among those affected. In the UK, the National Pharmacy Association warned that email problems could delay some prescriptions. In Japan, where most businesses and institutions use Microsoft services, some companies temporarily went back to using fax machines. Workers in Australia and the UK found an unexpected upside, with some using the email blackout as a reason to leave work early on Friday.

It is the third major Microsoft 365 disruption this year, following multi-hour outages in January and a code-update failure in August that took several days to fully resolve — a pattern that will put the promised post-incident report under close scrutiny.

What comes next

Microsoft says it will publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete, and Lamanna said the company is reviewing the incident and working to prevent similar disruptions. For users, the practical advice is simple: services are back, delayed mail should now have arrived, and anyone still seeing missing messages should check their inbox and spam folders before raising a support ticket.

The outage is a reminder of how much of the working world now runs on a handful of cloud services. When one of them stumbles, the effects show up everywhere at once — in parliaments, pharmacies and classrooms as well as inboxes. Read our earlier coverage of the outage as it unfolded: Microsoft 365 Outage Locks Users Out of Outlook as Server Failures Spread.

Sources

• Engadget — Microsoft services are returning after an outage took down Outlook, Teams and more
• The Hindu — Microsoft outage live updates
• The Economic Times — Microsoft says services fully recovered after global outage disrupts Outlook, Teams
• Business Today — Microsoft 365 disruption hits 74 countries
• RansomNews — Microsoft 365 outage: was it a cyberattack? What we know
• Microsoft Service Health Status (status.cloud.microsoft)