Microsoft Global Outage: Fixes "Not Taking as Expected" as Outlook and Teams Remain Disrupted

A global outage has been disrupting several Microsoft 365 services since Thursday evening, including Outlook, Teams and the Copilot assistant. According to Downdetector, users across dozens of countries have reported trouble accessing email and business messaging tools, in what is Microsoft 365's third major outage of 2026, following incidents in January and late August.

An outage stretching past 24 hours

According to Yahoo News UK, the first reports appeared around 6:15pm UK time on Thursday, with reports of Outlook problems in the US peaking at more than 130,000. Forbes Australia, which tracked the incident live from Australia, put the worldwide peak at around 120,000 Outlook reports. Both outlets agree on the scale: per Downdetector, users in 74 countries reported issues within a single hour on Thursday, and around 60 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, were still affected on Friday.

Beyond Outlook and Teams, the outage also hit SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Copilot, Planner, To Do, Intune, Defender XDR, Defender for Office 365, Purview, some Power BI functions (some users couldn't export confidential reports to PDF), the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, and Universal Print.

Several public bodies and companies reported trouble: per AAP (cited by Forbes Australia), Service NSW, the NSW Parliament, the ACT and Northern Territory governments, and Queensland Health in Australia. Per Yahoo News UK, Japan's National Disaster Management Agency (unable to send or receive email), the Government of Western Australia, Alberta's courts in Canada, and Malaysian bank Maybank also reported disruptions, as did UK charity Samaritans.

Fixes that won't hold

In a statement quoted by Yahoo News UK, Microsoft acknowledged: "We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected." The company added: "We'll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online."

Microsoft says it is "not aware of any malicious activity" causing the incident. Executive vice president Charles Lamanna confirmed the outage did not appear to be the result of a cyberattack. According to Forbes Australia, it wasn't caused by a surge in users either: some of the servers running these services reportedly stopped working, overloading the rest of the infrastructure.

Given the length of the incident (tracked under code MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center), the company extended the window before a stuck email bounces to 48 hours, so pending messages aren't lost. The Microsoft 365 Status account reported "early stabilization and capacity improvements" as recovery actions continue, without giving a time for full resolution. Microsoft said it would share full root-cause details once the incident is mitigated.

Key takeaways

• A global outage has disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and several other Microsoft 365 services since Thursday evening.
• Users in 74 countries reported issues within one hour on Thursday; around 60 countries remained affected on Friday.
• Public bodies (Australia, Japan, Canada) and companies had their email communications affected.
• Microsoft admits its fixes are "not taking as expected" and rules out a cyberattack.
• No time for full resolution has been given; stuck emails are being held for 48 hours instead of bouncing.
• This is Microsoft 365's third major outage of 2026, after incidents in January and late August.

Sources

• Forbes Australia: "Microsoft outage: Outlook and Teams still down after 17 hours," Samuel Hussey, November 13, 2026
• Yahoo News UK: "Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Teams worldwide as fixes fail to work as expected," Gerry McLaughlin, November 13, 2026

Photo: sign at the entrance to Microsoft's Redmond campus. Credit Derrick Coetzee, public domain.