Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Teams into Friday

Microsoft was still restoring Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services Friday morning after a worldwide outage left some users unable to open their inboxes or send and receive email. The disruption began Thursday afternoon and also affected Teams and Copilot.

Downdetector received more than 20,000 reports of problems with Microsoft services in Canada on Thursday, according to The Canadian Press. In the United States, the tracker logged about 130,000 reports for Outlook alone around 1 p.m. Eastern.

Microsoft’s outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector.

Microsoft says its Exchange Online incident began at 16:17 UTC. Reports to Downdetector about Outlook began climbing at about 17:25 UTC, 12:25 in New York. By 18:25, reports about five Microsoft services combined reached 19,650 a minute, against <15 a minute on an average Thursday.

Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level.

Reports did not stay in the Americas. They jumped tenfold in the UK at 17:43, in India at 23:21 local time and in New Zealand at 06:55 local time. Between 17:00 and 18:55 UTC, nearly 3 in 10 reports came from outside the US. We count a country here once its reports reach ten times normal and at least 20 in five minutes.

Reports about Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold, and Azure about a hundredfold. Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn, also Microsoft’s, rose far less.

Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions. At 19:38 UTC, reports were still running at more than 11,000 a minute.

— Downdetector (@downdetector) November 12, 2026

Via Rail warned passengers that emails about their trips might not arrive and directed them to its online train tracker and text alerts. At Unity Health Toronto, staff had trouble sending and receiving email. The hospital network advised patients with urgent questions about upcoming appointments to call and said patient care continued as usual.

In Hamilton, McMaster University warned Thursday that the Microsoft 365 outage could delay Outlook emails and disrupt online forms and service requests. The university said classes would continue as scheduled.

Microsoft reports progress on recovery

Microsoft said a process that establishes secure connections became overwhelmed, leaving some servers unable to handle requests. Some servers briefly recovered after engineers brought them back online, then stopped responding again as traffic returned. Microsoft said it had found no indication of malicious activity.

By Friday morning, Microsoft reported that users in parts of the Asia-Pacific region were regaining access to their mailboxes and that delayed emails were being processed. The company said it was extending repairs to other regions and warned that some users could still experience intermittent problems. Microsoft is tracking the outage as MO1550821 on its Microsoft 365 service health dashboard.