Microsoft is working to restore major services including Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 after a widespread outage left thousands of users unable to access emails, collaboration tools and other services.
Microsoft has suffered a widespread outage affecting major services including Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365, with tens of thousands of users reporting problems around the world.
The technology giant said it was working to restore services after changes intended to improve the situation failed to have the expected effect.
Microsoft wrote on X on Friday (13.11.26): “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected.”
The company added: “We’re continuing to monitor the results of changes applied so we can identify strategic actions that can help to improve service health across all affected regions.”
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded almost 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook shortly after 1pm ET on Thursday (12.11.26), with users reporting that they could not send or receive emails or were unable to load their inboxes.
More than 38,000 reports were also logged for Microsoft 365, while around 4,500 users reported difficulties accessing Teams.
Microsoft said its investigation had found that part of its infrastructure was experiencing unusually high loads across multiple regions.
The company said the issue was not being caused by increased traffic, but by servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable and placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
Microsoft said in an earlier update: “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”
Microsoft paused deployments and began routing additional traffic away from affected infrastructure while restarting servers.
The firm said: “We’re actively restarting and validating the affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we’re assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.”
The company later said servers that had been restored could become unresponsive again when receiving traffic, as engineers investigated what was triggering the failures.
Microsoft also tested an alternative health-check system which allowed some affected servers to return to service, while preparing automated recovery systems to detect and restart unresponsive servers.
The disruption also affected services operated by other technology companies.
OpenAI said it was investigating problems with Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections could fail and tools might not work as expected.
Anthropic also said an issue with an upstream provider was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft had earlier said a Teams outage affecting users in North America had been resolved, but warned that Microsoft 365 connectivity problems could affect users in other regions.
Microsoft outage affects tens of thousands of users worldwide
