Microsoft 365 outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot in 74 countries, including OpenAI and Anthropic

In brief

• A global Microsoft 365 outage on 12–13 November 2026 disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot in 74 countries.
• Downdetector logged more than 130,000 Outlook complaints in the US at the peak within one hour.
• Government agencies, the UK NHS and OpenAI and Anthropic were among those affected, and full recovery had not been confirmed by the morning of 13 November.

Outage starts in the Americas and spreads

Problems began on the evening of Wednesday, 12 November, when users in North and South America began reporting failures with Microsoft's cloud services. The company said the disruption affected Exchange Online, the cloud email service behind corporate Outlook, along with features that depend on it across Microsoft 365 (В работе Microsoft произошел глобальный сбой. Последствия затронули OpenAI и Anthropic – Meduza). Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports about Outlook from users in the United States within a single hour at the peak (Глобальный сбой Microsoft 365 ударил по госструктурам, бизнесу и ИИ-компаниям – forklog.com).

The failure then moved to Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Australia's Federal Police and its intelligence agency reported email problems, and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had told him it saw no sign of a hack (Сервисы Microsoft (в том числе почта Outlook) не работают более чем в 70 странах мира. В Японии чиновники вернулись к бумажным документам, в Великобритании пациенты не могут получить рецепты на лекарства – Meduza).

Services and institutions affected

Beyond email, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, the Microsoft Store and Xbox Live were also hit, and Copilot requests timed out or failed (У роботі Outlook, Teams та інших сервісів Microsoft стався масштабний глобальний збій – Українська правда). In Britain, the National Health Service said some patients could be delayed in receiving prescriptions. In Japan, a government communications network linking ministries stopped working properly, forcing officials back to paper documents. OpenAI, Anthropic and several Indian airlines also reported disruptions (Глобальный сбой Microsoft затронул OpenAI, Anthropic и авиакомпании – repost.news).

Cause and recovery

Microsoft said the cause was not a cybersecurity incident («Потерянный рабочий день». Что известно о глобальном сбое Microsoft – Zerkalo). According to the company, a large number of servers became unavailable after failing automated health checks, and their load shifted to the remaining infrastructure. It began rolling back a network configuration change that coincided with the start of the outage, but did not confirm that this change was the root cause (Глобальный сбой в сервисах компании Microsoft, затронувший госструктуры, продолжается почти сутки – The Insider). Early restart attempts failed because servers stopped responding again once traffic returned.

By the morning of 13 November, Microsoft said availability and mail delivery were improving across much of the affected infrastructure and that North America was recovering, though some users still saw intermittent problems (Пострадали OpenAI и Anthropic. Сбой в работе Microsoft затронул десятки тысяч пользователей — что произошло – NV). Roughly 16 hours after the first reports, the company had not fully restored its services (Масштабный сбой Microsoft 365 затронул миллионы людей по всему миру – Charter 97).

Second major outage this year

This is the second large Microsoft 365 disruption of 2026, after an earlier one in January.

Read also

• Global Microsoft 365 outage locks users out of Outlook, Teams and other services
• Global Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 for hours