Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps were disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday 12-11-2026 , with Microsoft saying it was still working to return affected servers to service, but had observed limited recovery.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company “had no indication of a cyber attack”.
Outage website Down Detector showed a spike in Microsoft 365 problems around 1pm ET, with nearly 130,000 reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. AI assistant Copilot was also affected.
New reports fell from that peak, to around 13,000 five hours later, but many said they couldn’t send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether.
Earlier, Microsoft said that a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load” – which it said was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”. The company determined a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” due to a problem that caused them to fail during automated checks.
Posting on X, Microsoft said it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods”.
The company said the servers it had restored had remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining affected servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” the company said in a statement.
– theguardian.com
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