Microsoft was still working early Friday to fully restore Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services after a widespread outage that began Thursday afternoon and left millions of people unable to open their email, schedule meetings or use the company’s Copilot AI assistant.
As of early Friday, Microsoft reported “early stabilization and capacity improvements,” but its service health dashboard said capacity had not returned to normal and health “remains variable” as traffic was gradually brought back, according to TechRadar.
What happened
Problems began in the early afternoon Eastern time on Thursday, November 12. In the U.S., outage reports peaked around 1:30 p.m. ET, Euronews reported. Outlook was hit hardest, with users unable to reach their mailboxes or send and receive email. Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools also had problems.
On the outage-tracking site Downdetector, U.S. reports for Outlook climbed above 130,000 at the peak, with more than 46,000 for Microsoft 365, according to Euronews. TechRadar said reports fell to about 40,000 by late Thursday night, and that the outage affected users in at least 74 countries. Downdetector counts do not necessarily reflect the true number of people affected.
What Microsoft has said
Microsoft first said users in the Americas could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes and that part of its infrastructure was under “higher than normal load,” Euronews reported. As the night went on, the company paused deployments and configuration changes, pulled affected servers out of service after they failed automated health checks and restarted infrastructure, according to a timeline compiled by the Azure Blog from Microsoft’s status updates.
Microsoft said a core process on the affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity. It reported positive results from restarts overnight, though a later change was “not taking as expected,” according to the Azure Blog. The company has said it is not aware of any malicious activity and has not published a final root cause. A Teams messaging problem in the Americas was resolved earlier Thursday.
Your email should still arrive
One piece of good news: Microsoft is extending the email timeout window to 48 hours so delayed messages should eventually be delivered, TechRadar reported. The Azure Blog noted that delivery may be delayed but mail is not lost.
- Don’t reinstall: reinstalling Office, deleting Outlook profiles or resetting passwords will not fix a server-side outage, the Azure Blog advised.
- Check status: Microsoft posts updates on its service health pages and the Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
- Use a backup: for urgent matters, call or text instead of relying on email until service is stable.
- Watch for scams: outages bring fake “fix your account” emails and texts. Never enter your password from a link in an unexpected message.
Why it matters
Microsoft 365 runs email and calendars for countless businesses, schools, hospitals and government offices, so a long outage ripples far beyond the company. Microsoft shares slipped in early trading Friday as engineers worked on the fix, TipRanks reported. Outages like this also renew questions about how much of daily life depends on a handful of cloud providers.
It is the second Outlook headline this month; earlier, Microsoft patched an Outlook flaw that hackers were exploiting. For the market impact, see our report on stocks ahead of Friday’s inflation data.
What to watch next
Watch for Microsoft to confirm full restoration and publish a post-incident report explaining the cause. Upstormed News will update this story as the company shares more.
Why it matters for families
If your child’s school or your employer uses Outlook or Teams, expect delayed messages and missed meeting invites today. Check school apps, texts or phone calls for urgent updates, and be patient: messages sent during the outage should arrive once service recovers.
Were you affected by the Microsoft outage? Tell us how it hit your day in the comments.
Read more: Microsoft patches Outlook flaw hackers are exploiting
Sources: TechRadar, “Microsoft outage live — Outlook and Teams still down for millions” (November 13, 2026); Euronews, “Microsoft racing to fix global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot” (November 12, 2026); Azure Blog, “Microsoft 365 outage, 12 November 2026: what happened and what admins can do” (November 13, 2026); TipRanks, “Stock Market Today, Nov. 13” (November 13, 2026)
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