Microsoft Outlook and 365 Services Begin Recovering After Outage
Microsoft began restoring Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365 services on Friday after a global outage that lasted nearly 18 hours and disrupted email access for millions of users, The Hindu reported. The disruption began Thursday, November 12, peaking at nearly 130,000 Outlook issue reports on Downdetector shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern Time, according to The Hindu. Downdetector said outage reports spanned 74 countries and territories within an hour, with Outlook complaints surging over 2,000 times normal levels and Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams, OneDrive, and Azure rising roughly a hundredfold, The Hindu reported.
Root Cause Investigation and Recovery Steps
Microsoft attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on a portion of its infrastructure across multiple regions and said it had found no evidence of "malicious activity," The Hindu reported. The company paused deployments, rerouted traffic, restarted servers, and extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages, according to The Hindu. In an 8 a.m. Eastern update on Friday, Microsoft reported broader recovery in North America and much of Europe alongside recovery signals in Asia Pacific, though it gave no timeline for full restoration, The Verge reported. Senior Verge correspondent Tom Warren reported that the outage is linked to Azure VNet configuration changes, and Microsoft said it will publish a full post-incident report after mitigation. Microsoft 365 suffered four major outages in January 2026, including a nine-hour disruption on January 22, according to Messageware. Under Microsoft's 99.9% monthly uptime SLA for Exchange Online, Teams, and SharePoint Online, tenant admins must file a service credit claim by the end of the calendar month after the incident, according to SOCRadar.
Global Impact on Governments, Healthcare, and Business
In Britain, GMB union official Rachel Harrison said the outage had a "serious impact" on the National Health Service, creating a backlog, while the National Pharmacy Association reported prescription delays, The Hindu reported. The U.K. Supreme Court, the Philippines' Supreme Court, Singapore's Government Technology Agency, and Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki all reported government email or IT disruptions, according to The Hindu. European exchange operator Euronext asked listed companies to use telephone calls for corporate notices, and luxury group Richemont delayed its first-half results announcement, The Hindu noted.
In India, airline IndiGo reported email support disruptions while Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected, The Hindu reported. Bharti Airtel's internal communications and client outage alerts were disrupted alongside a surge in call-centre traffic, and a Big Four professional services firm also experienced internal disruptions, according to The Hindu. Atsuya Technologies CEO Rahul Ganapathy said firms outside Microsoft's ecosystem still faced disrupted client emails and Teams meetings, while FOSS United CEO Sai Rahul Poruri urged India to diversify email providers rather than replacing National Informatics Centre dependence with a single vendor like Zoho, The Hindu reported. SOCRadar put the global peak of Outlook reports on Downdetector near 140,000, with nearly seven in 10 coming from the United States, a higher count than the roughly 130,000 The Hindu cited.