Microsoft 365 Outage, November 12, 2026: What Is Down and the Timeline

On Thursday, November 12, 2026, a morning Teams incident in North America was followed by Exchange Online mailbox problems that spread worldwide by early afternoon Eastern. By 1:07 PM Microsoft said users in any region could be affected, and reports on Downdetector spread across Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Copilot and Azure (Windows Central).

This page covers what is affected, the timeline of Microsoft’s updates from its @MSFT365Status account and service status page, what Microsoft has said about the cause, and what your team can do while the outage continues. We will update it as Microsoft posts new information.

Yes, as of our last check. Microsoft’s public service status page lists Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) as a service degradation with the message that users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services. That entry was last updated at 12:08 AM UTC on November 13, which is 7:08 PM Eastern, and Microsoft’s next update is due by 8:30 PM Eastern.

Microsoft posts outage details on the public status page specifically because administrators may not be able to reach the admin center during an incident like this one. Its own service health documentation points admins to the same two places when they cannot sign in: status.cloud.microsoft and @MSFT365Status on X.

Microsoft’s incident MO1550821 says users may be unable to connect to Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, several Microsoft Purview services, part of Power BI, parts of the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, Universal Print and Windows 365 Cloud PCs that use Customer Key (Microsoft status page). The list has grown during the afternoon. At 7:00 PM Microsoft clarified that only features that work with Exchange Online and email are affected, and parts of these services that do not depend on Exchange Online keep working (service health record). User reports also climbed for OneDrive, Azure and the Microsoft Store. The table separates what Microsoft has confirmed from what users are reporting.

Downdetector complaints for Outlook peaked near 130,000, with more than 38,000 for Microsoft 365, according to Inquisitr. Those are user reports, not a count of affected accounts.

All times are Eastern on November 12, 2026, taken from Microsoft’s posts on @MSFT365Status unless another source is named. Microsoft gives the full detail inside the Microsoft 365 admin center under the incident IDs.

Microsoft’s explanation has changed during the day, which is normal for a live incident. Its first theory was elevated load on part of its infrastructure. An hour later it said the load was a symptom: a number of servers had gone offline unexpectedly, and the remaining servers were carrying their work.

Later updates point to the reason those servers dropped out. They were failing automated health checks, and Microsoft says those failures may come from a specific component on the servers that processes those checks. Microsoft says it has not found a recent change that lines up with the start of the outage, and it paused all deployments while it investigates. It tested a change that bypasses that component and looked into elevated processor usage on affected servers.

By 3:56 PM the picture shifted again. A different health check method let a subset of servers return to service, and Microsoft began applying it more broadly. Its review of recent changes also turned up a small number of configuration updates it is now investigating as possible contributors, and at 4:41 PM it said it is assessing whether reverting them could speed recovery. That walks back the earlier statement that no recent change lined up with the start of the outage.

At 5:11 PM Microsoft said those actions had not provided the relief it expected. Its investigation found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which makes the servers stop responding and reduces capacity. It is testing a recovery approach on an isolated portion of its infrastructure, restarting components and slowly reintroducing traffic, and is weighing whether isolating traffic within each region would let regions recover independently.

By 6:06 PM Microsoft reported its first real progress: some affected servers were back in service and stable, and moving traffic to alternative pathways had brought limited recovery in some regions. It said recovery will be gradual as apps reconnect.

That progress did not hold. At 7:08 PM Microsoft said servers it had returned to service can stop responding again once traffic reaches them. It is studying diagnostic data to find the trigger, limiting which types of requests reach the affected servers in some locations to see whether one kind of traffic is responsible, and rebuilding some servers with a previous software configuration to test whether that keeps them stable.

Microsoft can publish a post-incident report with root cause information and next steps for a specific issue, and admins find it in Service health in the admin center. Until then, treat the cause as preliminary.

There is nothing to fix on your own computers. The best use of the time is to keep people working and avoid creating new problems.

1. 1
   Check status.cloud.microsoft before opening tickets or troubleshooting. If it shows the outage, the fix is on Microsoft’s side.
2. 2
   Leave Outlook open. In classic Outlook with cached Exchange mode, recent mail and calendars stay readable even while the mailbox cannot connect.
3. 3
   Do not delete and recreate Outlook profiles or reinstall Office. A new profile can remove the offline copy your staff is reading from.
4. 4
   Move urgent conversations to phone or text, and tell clients how to reach you if email is down.
5. 5
   Be wary of calls or messages claiming to be Microsoft support that offer to fix the outage. Microsoft does not need your password to restore its own service.
6. 6
   Keep a short note of what stopped working and when. It helps with any service credit claim later.

What we saw with our clients today

Our clients felt this one, and so did businesses in other countries. Outlook, Copilot, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams all came up in the calls we took. Normally we alert clients by email when Microsoft has a problem. That does not work when email is the thing that is down, so we posted a notice on our website instead.

That is the lesson we would pass on to any business: the channel you use to announce an outage cannot run on the service that is out. Decide now where your staff and clients will look, whether that is your website, a phone tree or text messages, and make sure they know about it before the next one. If your team is stuck right now, tell us what you are seeing and we will help where we can.

This is not the first multi-service Microsoft 365 outage of 2026. Microsoft had others in January and July. A few steps reduce how much each one costs you.

On-Site Technology offers email bagging as part of its continuity services, so no inbound email is lost to bounce-backs and messages are queued for delivery as soon as Microsoft 365 recovers. On the devices we manage, Outlook runs in cached Exchange mode, and our backup and continuity services keep a copy of your data outside Microsoft’s cloud. If you want email bagging in place before the next outage, ask us about it.

Will Microsoft give a credit for the outage?

Possibly. Microsoft’s service level agreement for Microsoft Online Services is backed by service credits, and for many services it uses a 99.9% monthly uptime target. If uptime for a service falls below that, the credit is a percentage of that service’s monthly fees: 25% below 99.9%, 50% below 99% and 100% below 95% for services such as Exchange Online. Credits are not automatic. Your admin has to submit a claim, due by the end of the month after the incident. For a sense of scale, 99.9% of a 30-day month allows about 43 minutes of downtime, so a multi-hour outage for the affected users can cross that line.

If Microsoft 365 is central to how your business runs, our managed Microsoft 365 services cover licensing, administration, security and continuity. For background on how Microsoft’s built-in retention differs from a real backup, see our guide to Microsoft 365 backup for business. Related reading: SharePoint vs OneDrive and Microsoft 365 business plans.