Microsoft 365 outage reports from 74 countries extend into second day
Key Facts
The Microsoft 365 outage stretched into a second day, affecting Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot and leaving individuals, institutions and businesses around the world without access to email and other platforms, according to the Associated Press. Reports began on Thursday, November 12, 2026, when Downdetector said it had received them from 74 countries and territories in about an hour. The reports showed the disruption spreading rapidly across regions, while its effects continued on services institutions use in their daily operations. Microsoft said email queues had fallen sharply and were approaching normal levels. But it said some users could continue to face delayed message delivery or intermittent access, making the recovery gradual rather than immediate.
Microsoft attributed pressure on its systems to an unexpectedly large number of servers becoming unavailable, and said it was not caused by a general increase in traffic. The company had halted all deployments, diverted additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarted servers in an effort to bring them back online, Reuters reported. In an update on Friday, the company described broader improvement in North America and continued improvement across large parts of Europe, along with encouraging signs of recovery in Asia-Pacific. Still, it warned some users could experience intermittent access or delayed email delivery while remediation continued on the remaining affected infrastructure. The company had, up to that point, seen no indication that the outage resulted from malicious activity.
The disruption also affected services that rely on or connect to Microsoft 365 tools. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, while Copilot was affected among Microsoft’s own services. In Japan, authorities said they had secured alternative communications, including telephones, after government IT infrastructure was affected. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency also reported that government email was down and said it was working with Microsoft to address the problem. Greece’s digital governance minister, Dimitrios Papastergiou, said ministries using Outlook, Teams and Copilot were affected, but added that the disruption had not significantly hindered their work.
Authorities in Britain reported disruption to public services: police forces said they were unable to receive crime reports online, while the National Pharmacy Association warned that some people could face delays getting their prescriptions because email systems at the National Health Service were affected. The British government said it was working with Microsoft to assess the impact on public services and that robust contingency plans were in place to limit disruption. In India, Air India temporarily redirected its email services but said flight operations were unaffected. IndiGo said other support channels remained operational and its flights were unaffected. These steps show how organizations responded to the loss of communication channels while essential operational services at the two Indian airlines continued.
In the business sector, Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly results call, scheduled for November 12, to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage, Reuters reported. On the day the outage began, Downdetector recorded more than 97,000 reports of Outlook problems at 2:07 p.m. Eastern time. It also recorded more than 38,000 reports of Microsoft 365 problems and about 4,500 reports involving Teams. These are reports submitted to the monitoring platform, not an independent count of all affected users. Workhorse’s case shows the disruption extended to announced business events, not just technical access.
An expert at the University of St Andrews linked the broad impact to the services’ shared infrastructure, saying Outlook, Teams and Copilot share much of their underlying infrastructure and that a failure in one component could affect all three services. Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to Microsoft 365, a figure that illustrates the platform’s reach among institutions. In the market, Microsoft shares fell 1.4% in premarket trading on Friday, November 13, according to AP. The stock had closed at $523 in the November 12 session, according to EL7 data. The next operational step announced by the company remained continuing to divert traffic and restore affected servers, with intermittent problems and email delays potentially persisting during the recovery.