A Major Microsoft 365 Outage Affected Millions Of People Around The World
- 13.11.2026, 14:26
What happened?
On Thursday evening and Friday morning, millions of people were unable to access their email, messaging, and video conferences in Teams. The cause was a large-scale outage of Microsoft 365 that affected users around the world, according to The Guardian (translation by Charter97.org).
The issues affected businesses, government agencies, and even Microsoft employees themselves. What happened, why did the outage drag on, and what does this situation reveal about our dependence on online services in 2026?
What happened to Microsoft?
Around 6:00 p.m. GMT on Thursday, the outage-tracking website Down Detector recorded a sharp increase in the number of complaints about Microsoft 365—a suite of cloud-based programs that includes Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. At that moment, nearly 130,000 reports of issues had been received.
The outage lasted nearly 16 hours. Microsoft attempted to restore service.
By Friday morning, the company determined that most of the issues were related to Microsoft Exchange—the email system on which Outlook runs. Video conferences and chats in Teams were already available again by that time.
In its latest update on the recovery process, Microsoft stated: “We are seeing the first signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels. Service performance remains unstable.”
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Based on available data, the cause may have been a configuration error following a configuration update. Because of this, some servers became overloaded and went offline, Microsoft reported.
When the company attempted to resolve the issues, the servers that had been brought back online stopped responding to requests again after user traffic was restored.
After some servers were taken offline, the load was redistributed to the remaining operational servers. As a result, additional problems arose on those servers as well.
To determine the exact cause of the outages, the company began limiting the amount of traffic directed to the affected servers in certain regions. On some of them, engineers rolled back to a previous version of the software configuration to see if that would help restore service.
Why has the Microsoft 365 outage lasted so long?
For a service of Microsoft 365’s scale, such a prolonged outage is a rare occurrence.
The company has not yet explained why the recovery has been delayed. However, its statements suggest that engineers had to change their initial plan of action. After attempts to restore service, the servers would stop responding again when the load returned. As a result, the specialists had to find alternative ways to resolve the issues, and the process took longer than expected.
Who was affected by the Microsoft outage?
On Friday morning, many Microsoft 365 users in Australia reported that they could not access their email. Local councils, state and federal government agencies, courts, and schools reported communication issues.
The outage also affected companies and healthcare organizations that use Microsoft 365 for communication.
In the United Kingdom, the government stated that it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess the impact of the outage on government services. They also assured the public that there are “robust contingency plans” in place to minimize disruptions.
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which has a five-year agreement to use Microsoft 365 in England, reported that the outage disrupted a number of services, including remote consultations with psychologists and psychotherapists.
According to sources within the NHS, the healthcare system faced “widespread” and “serious” disruptions. Healthcare workers reported being unable to access email and internal systems.
Due to problems with the NHS email system, pharmacies also faced difficulties coordinating prescriptions with some medical practices. This led to “significant” delays in dispensing medications.
Several police forces in the UK asked the public not to try to file crime reports online, but to call instead.
Some schools warned parents that email and Teams were not working. Parents could only report a child’s absence or other attendance issues by phone.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported disruptions in their email support services. Taiwanese companies in the cybersecurity, life insurance, and investment fund management sectors also reported disruptions to their services.
The problems also affected financial markets: some investment portfolio managers were unable to use email to verify access to trading platforms.
In Japan, the transportation company Sagawa Express reported that it was unable to accept online orders for certain services at airports and train stations. Major pharmaceutical company Taisho was forced to take orders by phone.
Was a cyberattack the cause of the outage?
Against the backdrop of a recent attack by an OpenAI agent on the Medicare system and a series of cyberattacks in Europe that caused internet-connected refrigerators went offline, some users speculated that the global outage might be the result of a new attack on critical infrastructure.
However, Microsoft quickly dismissed this theory. The company stated that no signs of a cyberattack had been detected.
What does this incident say about our dependence on online services?
The name Microsoft 365 reflects the modern world’s reliance on round-the-clock availability of digital services. Software is no longer simply installed on personal computers but is also stored on providers’ servers. Therefore, such outages are inevitable. They usually don’t last long, but sometimes the consequences turn out to be much more serious.
Large-scale disruptions affecting telecommunications providers, the recent incident involving the PHP programming language, which caused numerous websites to go offline, and the global CrowdStrike outage in 2024 have shown just how varied the causes of such incidents can be.
Today, the operation of online services depends on a multitude of interconnected components. At the same time, the consequences of a failure in even one of them are far more far-reaching than before. Mark Gregory , an associate professor at RMIT University , stated on Friday that organizations need to thoroughly test updates before deploying them on live networks.
According to him, this is particularly important given the additional security checks that companies must perform to protect their systems from cybercriminals. Using artificial intelligence tools, attackers can find vulnerabilities faster than ever before.
Are backup options needed in case of service outages?
Gregory believes that companies relying on Microsoft 365 should have alternative tools available. For example, in the event of an outage, they can switch to Google’s Gmail email service.
Other experts suggest using LibreOffice—a free, open-source office suite that can replace Microsoft Office programs.