Microsoft 365 outage knocks out Outlook, Teams and other services

Microsoft Outlook and several other Microsoft 365 services went down on 12 November 2026, according to 9to5Mac, TechCrunch and Engadget. Microsoft acknowledged the problem and said the affected infrastructure was under elevated load. TechCrunch reports the issue was first flagged for the US and the Americas and later expanded to any region.

Business and consumer users were both affected. TechCrunch reports people could not reach their inboxes, and that Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR were also unavailable. It also lists OneDrive and Office for the web as inaccessible to consumers. Engadget says Planner, To Do, Intune, Defender for Office 365 and Purview were added to the affected list later, along with issues in Power BI and the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center. 9to5Mac cites Downdetector as showing over a hundred thousand Outlook outage reports.

Microsoft has not given a final cause. In status updates quoted by the outlets, it said the added load does not come from a rise in traffic. Instead, many of its servers dropped out unexpectedly, and the remaining infrastructure had to absorb their work. A later update said a key process on the affected servers was getting swamped, which made them stop responding. Microsoft said it paused all deployments and configuration changes while it checks recent changes, and is restarting and repairing infrastructure and weighing ways to redirect traffic. Its latest update said actions so far had not provided the expected relief. No restoration time has been announced. TechCrunch notes the previous major incident was a days-long Microsoft 365 outage in September, which Microsoft blamed on a core authentication configuration issue. This is a developing story.

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