A major global Microsoft outage has disrupted several essential services, leaving businesses and individual users struggling to access platforms such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, 12 November 2026, affected users who rely on Microsoft’s services for communication, email management, online meetings and daily business operations.
Multiple Services Affected
Among the affected platforms were Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Microsoft Copilot. Users reported difficulties accessing emails, sending messages, joining meetings and using certain cloud-based applications.
The disruption highlighted the extent to which businesses, educational institutions and organisations depend on Microsoft’s digital infrastructure to maintain their daily operations.
Microsoft Investigates Technical Problems
Microsoft confirmed that engineers were investigating the incident after several servers became unavailable following automated health checks. The company attempted to restore services by restarting affected servers, redistributing network traffic and implementing configuration changes.
However, recovery efforts faced challenges when some servers became unresponsive again after receiving increased traffic.
Microsoft continued working on additional recovery measures while monitoring the stability of its infrastructure.
No Evidence Of A Cyberattack
Amid concerns surrounding the widespread disruption, Microsoft indicated that there was no evidence suggesting the outage was caused by malicious activity or a cyberattack.
The incident was instead linked to technical and infrastructure-related problems that affected the availability of several services.
Services Gradually Recovering
Although improvements were reported in certain regions, Microsoft continued monitoring its systems and working towards restoring normal operations.
The outage has once again raised concerns about the reliability of cloud-based services and the impact that technical failures at major technology companies can have on businesses worldwide.
Microsoft has apologised for the disruption and encouraged users to follow its official service health updates for further information.
Main image: MyBroadband
