Microsoft 365 down worldwide: Outlook and Teams disrupted
· BehindLines newsroom
Microsoft is struggling to restore several of its online services after a worldwide outage on Thursday 12 November 2026. According to the BBC, The Register and TechCrunch, the Outlook email service, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant were among the services hit. The BBC mentions, based on unconfirmed reports, tens of thousands of affected users.
What Microsoft says
The BBC reports that the company blamed the incident on a number of servers that were "unexpectedly unavailable", which put strain on the other systems. According to The Register, Microsoft cited on X servers failing automated health checks, then a core process on those machines becoming overwhelmed. The site adds that the first measures did not bring the relief that was expected. It also writes that Microsoft had spotted no change in its systems that could have set off the incident, while considering the company's status page contradictory, since that page says the company is assessing whether to revert a few recent configuration updates. TechCrunch notes that Microsoft spoke of "elevated load" on part of its infrastructure, with traffic being rebalanced, and that it did not explain why so many servers were unavailable.
Services and users affected
According to The Register, Defender for Office 365, Copilot 365, Teams and Exchange Online went offline, and administrators lost access to tools such as Intune and the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center. TechCrunch adds that SharePoint and Defender XDR were also affected, as were, for individual consumers, OneDrive and Office for the web. Per that outlet, the incident, first reported for the United States and the American continent, later spread to "any region". The BBC cites the monitoring site Downdetector, which counted a peak close to 140,000 reports for Outlook, and says users in the United States and Japan, among others, reported disruption.
The sources do not agree on Teams: the BBC writes that Microsoft considered messaging and online meetings largely functional, whereas TechCrunch states that Teams was unavailable.
Effects on other companies
According to the BBC, OpenAI and Anthropic, which work with Microsoft's systems, were also hit; OpenAI said it was investigating a fault touching the way its systems connect with Microsoft's offerings, which stopped some tools from working normally. Workhorse Group, an electric truck maker due to publish its third-quarter results on 12 November, pushed them back to 16 November, citing disruption tied to the outage, the outlet adds.
Where recovery stands
According to The Register, Microsoft said it had found and validated an alternative method of checking server health, which let a portion of the affected servers return to service. In an update cited by the same site, the company says it brought some servers back online; they stayed healthy at first but could stop responding as soon as they received traffic. The BBC specifies that Microsoft warned that restored services could stop responding again and that users located in "any region" were at risk. The Register notes that Microsoft had offered no timeline for full recovery. The BBC understands that nothing points to a cyber-attack.
Why it matters
The BBC describes Microsoft 365 as an online service widely used by businesses and essential to international organisations for communicating and collaborating with colleagues around the world. According to TechCrunch, Microsoft had given no specific cause at the time of publication and was still investigating: the exact cause is therefore not confirmed in the sources consulted.