Microsoft Outage Enters Second Day with Outlook and Teams Still Disrupted
Microsoft’s global outage has entered a second day, with Outlook and parts of Teams still disrupted. Microsoft says it is not aware of any malicious activity.
A global Microsoft outage affecting Outlook email and parts of Teams has continued into Friday 13 November 2026, more than 14 hours after the company first acknowledged the problem. Microsoft says it is not aware of any malicious activity behind the incident, and that a fix is starting to improve stability.
The problems began in Exchange Online, the email service that sits behind Outlook for business users, at 16:17 on Thursday 12 November 2026, and Microsoft first acknowledged them at 17:54. Its service status page was still showing degraded service on Friday for both business Microsoft 365 and its consumer products.
In its most recent status update, timed at 07:29 on Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing better server stability after patching part of its infrastructure, and that it was extending the patch to more regions. The company has not given a timeline for restoring service. A further update was due at 08:30.
Microsoft has said it is not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident. A Microsoft executive also confirmed to CNN that the outage was not the result of a security breach.
Microsoft says features that depend on Exchange Online or email are affected, while parts of Microsoft 365 that do not are still working. People may be unable to open their mailbox on the web, desktop or phone, and email may arrive late.
In Teams, chat and online meetings mostly still work, but calendars, scheduling, invites and meeting edits are affected. Copilot may not load, and a separate incident covers consumer services including Outlook.com, OneDrive and OneNote.
Some of Microsoft’s security tools are affected too. Links rewritten by Safe Links, a feature of Defender for Office 365, may fail to open, and administrators may be unable to release quarantined email.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed a spike in reports of Teams problems in Ireland and the UK at around 18:15 on Thursday, according to RTÉ. Microsoft has confirmed that users in any region could be affected, and Friday is the first full working day in Ireland to be hit, so workplaces in Cork that rely on Outlook and Teams may run into problems.
At its peak on Thursday, Downdetector had more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States. The tracker says Microsoft products were hit in 74 countries and territories.
Microsoft first said part of its infrastructure was under heavy load, and later that several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable and that increased traffic was not the cause. It is rolling back a network configuration change that coincided with the start of the problems, but has not confirmed that the change caused the outage. A post-incident report has been promised once services are restored.
Governments have been affected as well as businesses. Australia’s domestic intelligence agency and police were hit, Japan reported an impact on government IT infrastructure, and Immigration New Zealand paused the processing of all visa applications.
While email is down, Teams chat and calls can be used for urgent messages, and files stored directly in SharePoint can still be opened. IT administrators can follow incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, or on Microsoft’s service status page if the admin centre will not load.
As with any major outage, treat unexpected calls, emails or messages offering to fix the problem with caution, and check with your own IT support if in doubt.
The outage follows Microsoft 365 disruptions in January and August 2026, and an Azure outage in October 2026 that also hit Microsoft’s productivity apps.
This is a developing story. Last updated at 08:28 GMT on Friday 13 November 2026.
