Microsoft struggles to restore Outlook after a global outage disrupts email, Teams and Copilot across 74 countries and territories

Microsoft is struggling to restore its Outlook email service and other Microsoft 365 applications following a major global outage that disrupted businesses, government offices and individual users across 74 countries and territories.

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The technology giant said on Thursday, November 12, 2026, that its initial efforts to fix the disruption were not producing the expected results, forcing engineers to explore alternative measures to restore services.

The outage affected Outlook, Microsoft Teams and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, leaving users unable to access emails, send messages or use some work-related applications.

In an update posted on X, Microsoft said it had monitored changes introduced to improve service availability but found that they were not working as expected.

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

“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity,” it added, without providing a definite timeline for full restoration.

Microsoft attributed the disruption to unusually high demand on parts of its infrastructure across multiple regions, which it said was contributing to connectivity problems.

The company initially investigated reports affecting users in the Americas but later confirmed that the disruption could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity in any region.

According to outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, reports of service disruptions emerged across 74 countries and territories within about an hour.

Users in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa reported difficulties accessing Microsoft services, with organisations and government institutions among those affected.

New Zealand’s Foreign Ministry also informed users that its ability to receive emails had been disrupted, including services used by its embassies, consulates and representative offices worldwide.

The disruption was particularly significant for Outlook users, with some unable to access their mailboxes through desktop, mobile and web applications. Others experienced delays in sending and receiving messages.

Thousands of users also reported problems with Teams and Copilot, although the extent of the disruption varied across Microsoft’s applications.

The outage also affected services connected to Microsoft 365, including integrations used by artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies reported problems with their Microsoft connectors.

Microsoft said it had been redirecting traffic away from affected infrastructure, restarting servers and working to increase available capacity.

However, some servers reportedly became unresponsive again after being returned to service, complicating the recovery process.

The company later reported limited recovery as it attempted to route user traffic through alternative systems. It said users could experience gradual restoration as capacity returned and their applications reconnected.

Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the peak of the disruption, highlighting the scale of the incident.

Microsoft’s disruption also affected business operations, with reports of interrupted communications and delays to some corporate activities. However, the company had not announced a definite time for the complete restoration of all affected services.

The incident has renewed concerns about the dependence of businesses and public institutions on cloud-based communication platforms, particularly when a single infrastructure disruption can affect services used across multiple countries.

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Microsoft continued working on alternative recovery measures as users awaited the full restoration of Outlook and other affected applications.