Microsoft Global Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot; Outlook Reports Reach 1.3 Lakh

Guwahati: Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, faced a major outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026, disrupting access to Exchange Online mailboxes and email functions across North America and the Americas.

The Microsoft global outage began shortly after 1 PM local time, with Downdetector recording nearly 1.3 lakh Outlook-related reports.

Microsoft users experienced connectivity problems on Thursday as disruptions affected several services across the company's platform ecosystem.

According to the supplied outage information, users faced difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes, loading Outlook inboxes, and sending or receiving emails.

The disruption also affected Microsoft Teams and Copilot, making multiple Microsoft services unavailable or difficult to access during the incident.

Downdetector, an outage-tracking website that monitors user-submitted reports, recorded a sharp increase in complaints about Outlook. The number of reports peaked at nearly 1.3 lakh, or 130,000 users.

The outage began shortly after 1 PM local time, with North America and other parts of the Americas among the affected regions. Microsoft attributed the connectivity problems to elevated infrastructure load and multiple servers becoming unavailable.

According to the company's explanation in the supplied notes, several servers failed automated health checks, preventing them from remaining operational.

The infrastructure problems affected access to Microsoft's online services, including Exchange Online, which supports the company's email functionality. The incident involved multiple servers rather than a problem limited to individual Outlook inboxes.

Microsoft Corporation was investigating the outage and working to reduce its impact on users. In an official update posted through its Microsoft 365 Status account on social media platform X, the company stated, "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact."

The statement indicated that Microsoft's response focused on identifying ways to limit the disruption while engineers continued investigating the infrastructure problems. The company also reported progress in restoring affected services, although some servers remained unavailable.

Microsoft's response included the restoration of North American Teams services earlier in the incident, according to the supplied information.

However, the recovery process was not complete, as engineers continued working to bring the remaining unavailable servers back online.

Microsoft engineers were testing alternative health-check methods to address the server availability problems. The company had identified failed automated health checks as part of the infrastructure disruption and was exploring other methods to restore server operations.

Downdetector recorded nearly 1.3 lakh reports related to Outlook at the peak of the disruption.

The figure represents reports submitted to the outage-tracking platform and should not be interpreted as a confirmed count of unique affected users. The incident involved four core Microsoft services identified in the supplied information: Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Exchange Online.

With engineers continuing their recovery efforts, the remaining server availability issues were still being addressed in Microsoft's response.

Also Read: Japanese Delegation Visits Mangaldai to Explore Food as Medicine Research