LONDON, November 13, 2026 — A massive global Microsoft outage has disrupted services across 74 countries, affecting millions of users, including businesses, governments, and individuals who rely on Microsoft 365 apps. The outage, which began on Thursday evening, has left popular services like Teams and Outlook unavailable, with the company scrambling to fix the issue.
Global Outage Timeline
The outage started at 11:17 a.m. ET on Thursday, according to Microsoft, with reports of problems spreading to 74 countries and territories within about an hour. Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, reported nearly 130,000 problem reports across five Microsoft services, including Outlook, Microsoft 365, Onedrive, Copilot, and Teams. The issue has affected companies, governments, and tens of millions of users across the world, with the UK government saying it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on its services.
Impact On Businesses And Governments
The outage has had a significant impact on businesses and governments, with many reporting disruptions to their services. The NHS in England has enacted contingency measures, including using paper records, to maintain critical services and appointments. Several UK police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, South Wales Police, Dyfed-Powys Police, and Hertfordshire Police, have urged people not to try to report crimes online and to call them instead. The Singapore government and Australia’s spy agency have also reported service disruptions. In the US, municipal governments, including Baltimore County, Jacksonville, and Austin, have reported email outages, with 911 and other essential services not affected.
Microsoft’s Response
Microsoft has attributed the outage to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, which caused a number of servers to become “unexpectedly unavailable.” The company has ruled out a cyber-attack and is working to fix the issue. In its latest update, Microsoft said it was seeing “early signs of stabilization” and was extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages. The company’s recovery efforts are ongoing, with engineering teams cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely.
Recovery Efforts
As the recovery efforts continue, Microsoft reports that it is seeing “early signs of stabilization,” but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels. The company is prioritizing backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery. With the outage affecting millions of users worldwide, the impact is being felt across various industries, including finance, healthcare, and education. As the situation develops, Microsoft says it will provide full details of the root cause, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report. By Friday at 9 am GMT, Microsoft reported “early signs of stabilisation” in its efforts to improve capacity and enable more users to get back on its systems.
Sources
- Microsoft outage updates: Schools, GPs and businesses hit – follow live
- Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook
- Microsoft outage: How to report crime as Met and other police force sites hit by collapse – AOL
- What we know about the global Microsoft outage
- Live updates: Microsoft scrambles to fix major outage affecting millions across the world
Photo: Rept0n1x (CC BY-SA 3.0)
