Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and more are inaccessible for millions

Microsoft has suffered a global outage across most of its services which has now lasted more than 17 hours, and cut off services including Microsoft Exchange.

In October 2026, a change in Microsoft's Exchange Web Services affected Apple Mail. But now all of Exchange has gone down, as have multiple Microsoft 365 services.

According to the New York Times, the first problems were spotted at around 1:00 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, November 12, 2026. By 10:00 p.m., Microsoft reported that repairs were "not taking as expected."

Downdetector has been showing steadily falling numbers of reports of problems. However, it's likely that as people have learned of the news, they have stopped reporting their individual cases.

Microsoft is still reporting major problems across its services, and is posting roughly hourly updates on its status page. One update, now removed, reportedly said that Microsoft was seeing "early signs of stabilization."

The most recent update at around 6:00 a.m. Eastern was more positive. "We've made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region," it says. "Traffic is being gradually restored, and we're seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing."

"However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues," it continues. "Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency."

This and at least most of the company's updates have repeated the same basic detail about the cause of the issue. "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident," it says. "We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation."

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