Microsoft 365 outage persists with limited recovery after global disruption

Microsoft 365 suffered a major global outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026, disrupting email and other services for tens of thousands of users, with the company reporting only "limited recovery" by evening. The disruption, attributed to "elevated load" on infrastructure, affected Outlook, Teams, and AI assistant Copilot across 74 countries and territories. In the U.S., roughly 130,000 Outlook users reported issues early, declining to about 37,000 by 6 pm Eastern Time. Microsoft paused deployments, restarted servers, and rerouted traffic to restore service, warning users of gradual reconnection. Downdetector maps showed impacts across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.