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Outlook, Teams and Copilot are back online after a disruption that hit users in more than 70 countries
Microsoft says its Microsoft 365 services are fully operational again after a global outage that ran from November 12 to November 14, 2026.
For roughly two days, Outlook, Teams and Copilot went from dependable background utilities to the main topic of conversation in offices across more than 70 countries.
What broke, and for how long #
Microsoft first acknowledged problems in the Americas at approximately 17:54 UTC on November 12. That initial notice marked the start of a disruption that would spread well beyond a single region.
At the peak, Downdetector logged up to 138,000 outage reports for Outlook alone. That figure covers just one app, and it only counts people who bothered to file a report.
Microsoft 365 has over 430 million subscribers.
Full restoration came on the morning of November 14. Microsoft reported that all products were working and that email backlogs had been cleared.
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The cause: a network upgrade gone sideways #
Microsoft traced the outage to a technical fault tied to an earlier network capacity upgrade. Later network changes then made the problem worse.
Microsoft also confirmed two things the outage was not. It was not a cyberattack, and it was not linked to artificial intelligence agents.
Who felt it #
The disruption reached government agencies, airlines, banks and healthcare providers. The UK’s National Health Service was among the organizations affected.
Operations in Japan, Singapore and Australia were also hit.
How Microsoft brought services back #
Microsoft took a cautious, step-by-step approach to recovery. Rather than flipping everything back on at once, the company restored services gradually and checked stability at each phase.
The process concluded once Microsoft’s service health page showed every product functioning normally.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.