Microsoft’s worldwide Microsoft 365 outage was still affecting workplace services on Friday, November 13, 2026, even as the company reported gradual recovery. Outlook email access, Teams calendar features and Microsoft 365 Copilot remained unreliable for some users, with no confirmed time for full restoration.
The disruption began with Exchange Online connection problems at 16:17 UTC on November 12. Microsoft registered a broader Microsoft 365 incident at 18:26 UTC, according to Microsoft’s incident notices reproduced by the University of Pennsylvania. The notices identify the incidents as EX1550543 and MO1550821.
Outlook users may be unable to open mailboxes through the web, desktop apps or mobile connections. Email delivery may also be delayed. Other affected services include Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online, Planner, parts of Microsoft Defender and the Microsoft 365 admin center. Impact differs by service and user.
The problem does not mean every Teams feature is offline. Microsoft said ordinary Teams chats, channel messages and many online meetings were largely working, while features tied to Exchange Online, such as calendar views, meeting invitations and scheduling, could fail. Copilot Chat may fail to load or retrieve work emails, calendars and files. Files stored directly in SharePoint remain accessible.
Microsoft’s investigation found that many servers became unavailable after automated health checks failed. That shifted demand onto the servers still working, creating capacity problems. The company has restarted infrastructure, rerouted traffic and deployed a patch to an authentication and routing component. It has not published a final root-cause finding.
In its 09:57 UTC update on November 13, Microsoft said customer reports and global monitoring showed incremental improvement, but service health remained inconsistent and capacity had not returned to its usual level. To reduce the risk of delayed email being lost during recovery, it extended the email timeout window to 48 hours while prioritizing queued messages.
The impact extended beyond private inboxes. Associated Press reported disruption to government communications and businesses in Asia and elsewhere, while outage tracker Downdetector logged roughly 130,000 Outlook problem reports around its Thursday peak. Those reports are user submissions, not a verified count of distinct customers.
Affected organizations should check the Microsoft 365 service-health instructions and their own admin dashboard before treating errors as local device faults. If the admin center is unavailable, Microsoft points users to its public status page. For urgent work, employees can use unaffected, organization-approved communication channels while IT teams monitor the incident.
The University of Auckland also warned that scammers were sending fake support messages linked to the outage. Users should not follow unexpected links claiming to fix Outlook or share login information with unverified senders.
Microsoft said it had no evidence of malicious activity connected to the incident. That is not a final explanation of the failure: the company has promised a post-incident report after recovery, and neither the complete cause nor the time of full restoration had been confirmed as of its latest reviewed update.
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