Microsoft outage drags on, disrupting Outlook, Teams and Copilot

From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.

Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads.” But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media.

Microsoft scrambles to recover services

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”

The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”

A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.

Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.

An earlier post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.

In a pair of more recent updates on Friday, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.”

“Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases,” the company said in a second post. “We’re seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.”

Previous Details

Microsoft reported a partial recovery from a nationwide outage affecting Microsoft 365 services, though disruptions continue.

Impacted services could include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Purview, and Power BI, according to Microsoft’s website. Outlook also appears to be down.

Microsoft said some affected servers are back online and have remained stable so far. The company has also rerouted traffic where possible, helping restore some service in certain regions.

It is working to bring the remaining servers back online and is testing measures to reduce the load on its systems. If those measures help, Microsoft will expand them to other locations. Users may see service return gradually as their apps reconnect.

Key Microsoft servers become overwhelmed, disrupting service

Microsoft said a key process on affected servers became overwhelmed, causing them to stop responding and reducing capacity.

The company tested an approach: isolating part of its system, restarting affected components, and slowly restoring traffic to check stability. It also looked at whether keeping traffic within each region could help affected regions recover separately.

Microsoft worked through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service. Additionally, Microsoft assessed whether reverting a small number of recent updates could help.

Microsoft reports outage Thursday morning

“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” Microsoft 365 Status posted on X Thursday morning.

We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026

Microsoft determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing an elevated load across multiple regions, which could be contributing to the connectivity errors.

“We’ve begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load,” the company stated.

Microsoft said it is looking into every pathway to reduce the impact. It also paused all deployments and is moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure.

“We’re restarting affected servers to return them to service,” the company stated.

City of Tacoma’s website back up

The City of Tacoma also reported that its website was unavailable Thursday morning and that many city employees are experiencing outages.

Around 11:30 a.m., officials said the website was back online, but employees are still experiencing email outages.

This is a developing story, check back for updates.

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Contributing: Associated Press.