Microsoft 365 Outage Runs Into Friday With Outlook, Teams and Copilot Only Partly Restored
Microsoft says unexpectedly unavailable servers overloaded the rest of its estate and reports early signs of stabilisation, but capacity is not back to normal and no fix time has been given.
Friday, November 13, 2026/3 min read
A Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday afternoon was still not fully repaired on Friday morning, with Outlook, Teams and Copilot among the services hit for users in more than 70 countries. As this piece is published, around 11:35 UTC on Friday 13 November, Microsoft says it is seeing early signs of stabilisation but that capacity has not returned to normal and it has given no time for a full fix.
Microsoft has said it is not aware of malicious activity behind the incident. The company's executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said there was no indication it was the result of a cyber attack, HuffPost UK reported. Reports describe a technical failure inside Microsoft's own infrastructure, and a full root-cause explanation has not yet been published.
When did the Microsoft outage start?
Microsoft told NBC News the incident began at 11:17 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, which is 16:17 UTC, according to NBC's live blog. Downdetector reports climbed over the following hours, reaching 74 countries and territories within about an hour and peaking at 19,650 a minute across Outlook, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Copilot and Teams, NBC said. Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Status account first said it was investigating users having trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes, under incident EX1550543, HuffPost UK reported.
What has Microsoft said caused it?
Microsoft's explanation, as carried by HuffPost UK, is that the elevated load on its servers was not driven by more traffic but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed their work onto the servers still running and overloaded them. A status update quoted by ABC7 said a process that sets up secure connections on the affected servers becomes overwhelmed, so the servers stop processing requests. NBC reported that Microsoft also applied a configuration patch to part of its authentication and routing infrastructure, and promised a post-incident report once the problem is mitigated.
Why so many servers dropped out has not been explained. Outside academics quoted by the Science Media Centre called a configuration change a plausible trigger, but they stressed that this was their inference, not a Microsoft finding.
What is the recovery status now?
The updates carried by ABC7 show a slow, uneven recovery. Microsoft reported positive results from restarting servers late on Thursday US time, then partial recovery that was not sustained, and then work on several parallel fixes. By early Friday it reported positive results for stability and added capacity. HuffPost UK said Microsoft later described some changes as not taking effect as expected and said it was looking for other ways to add capacity.
At about 09:30 UTC Microsoft reported early signs of stabilisation, but said capacity was not yet back to normal levels, the BBC reported in a piece syndicated by Yahoo. Microsoft has also extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so delayed messages are held rather than bounced, NBC said.
Who has been affected around the world?
NBC lists Euronext, Aviva and Maersk among firms reporting email problems, and says OpenAI and Anthropic reported trouble with their Microsoft connectors. Richemont briefly delayed its results and Workhorse Group postponed earnings, it said, while the Indian carriers IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India reported problems with email support. US local governments including Baltimore County, Jacksonville and Austin lost email, NBC added. In the UK, police forces, GP practices and Parliament were affected, as covered in the Digest's separate reports.
The next marker is Microsoft's own: a stable status page and the post-incident report it has promised, which should say why the servers went down.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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