Microsoft Outage: Outlook and Teams Down for a Second Day Worldwide

Last updated: Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, 6:35 a.m. ET. This is a developing story. Microsoft is posting updates every few hours, and we'll update this page as service comes back.

If your Outlook inbox looked frozen when you woke up Friday, you're not alone. A Microsoft outage that began Thursday was still knocking out email, Teams and other Microsoft 365 tools for users around the world early Friday, more than 12 hours after it started.

Microsoft says it's making progress. It has not said when everything will be back.

Microsoft outage: what's down

According to The Associated Press and CBS News, Microsoft said early Friday the problem was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and its email systems. Users reported Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot as down.

NBC News reported that Downdetector, which tracks user complaints, saw problem reports spread to 74 countries and territories within about an hour on Thursday. At the peak, it logged 19,650 reports a minute across Outlook, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Copilot and Teams. On a normal Thursday that number is under 15.

In the U.S. alone, almost 130,000 Outlook problem reports had come in just after 1 p.m. Thursday, The Washington Post reported. New reports have dropped since then, but plenty of people are still stuck.

Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its 365 apps.

Is Outlook back up?

Partly. Around 6 a.m. ET Friday, Microsoft said recovery work was finished on parts of its infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region.

"Traffic is being gradually restored, and we're seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing," the company said, according to NBC News. "However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues."

Next, it said, it will push the same fixes to other regions. That means people in the U.S. and Europe may see service return unevenly through Friday morning. Microsoft's service health page still listed Microsoft 365 as degraded, with a note that users "may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services."

One piece of good news for anyone waiting on an important message: Microsoft said it extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect mail that was sent but not delivered. It also said it's prioritizing the backlog of delayed email.

What caused it?

We don't know yet, and Microsoft hasn't said.

What the company has said is that it has no sign of malicious activity. In an update around 2:30 a.m. ET, it reported "positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure." It promised a full post-incident report with the root cause once the problem is fixed.

Australia's home affairs minister, Tony Burke, offered a clue after talking with Microsoft's top executive in that country. "They don't believe they are dealing with a cyberattack," Burke told reporters in Sydney, per AP. He said Microsoft believes it is dealing with something similar to the CrowdStrike outage, "where there is an update that has gone awry."

That July 2024 CrowdStrike failure grounded flights and disrupted banks and hospitals. So far, this one looks narrower. It's mostly hitting email and workplace tools, not airline operations or payment systems. Air India and IndiGo both said their flights were unaffected, though their customer email support was.

Who's been hit in the US

Several local governments said staff couldn't do normal work. Baltimore County said employees couldn't send or receive email but stressed that 911 and other essential services weren't affected, NBC News reported. Jacksonville, Florida, and Austin, Texas, said the same about email, and both said emergency lines were working.

Business felt it too. U.S. electric truck maker Workhorse Group delayed its quarterly earnings call. OpenAI and Anthropic said they'd had trouble with their Microsoft 365 connectors, CBS News reported.

Overseas, government email went down in Singapore, Japan reported disrupted communications between ministries, and the Philippines' Supreme Court said some of its operations were affected. In Britain, doctors' offices, schools and police forces told people to call instead of email.

What you can do right now

• Check Microsoft's status page before you start resetting passwords or reinstalling apps. This isn't a problem on your end.
• If you're waiting on something urgent, call or text the sender. Delayed messages should still arrive, but timing is unclear.
• Don't fall for "Microsoft support" emails or calls offering to fix your account. Big outages tend to bring out scammers.

Microsoft has also been in the news this month for its voluntary buyout offer to about 60,000 employees. For more on how a single bad update can ripple through consumer devices, see our report on the Samsung TV Log4j security issue.

What we're still waiting on

Microsoft hasn't named what triggered the outage or given a time for full recovery in the U.S. We'll update this story when it posts the root cause or declares the incident resolved.