Microsoft Races to Fix Outlook in One of Its Longest Outages
Microsoft Corp. is struggling to restore access to its flagship software and end an outage that has paralyzed government offices, traders and businesses globally.
Disruptions for Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool continued into a second day on Friday as Microsoft struggled to restore services. Previous disruptions have rarely lasted more than several hours.
We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026
The company has provided near hourly updates of its efforts to fix its malfunctioning systems and route user traffic away from affected servers. It said an investigation into the incident had found “a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss,” and said the cause wasn’t obviously malicious. Microsoft said in a status update on Friday that it was seeing “positive signs for server stability,” though services have not been restored.
Companies relying on Microsoft systems, including Swiss luxury group Richemont SA and US-based truck and bus manufacturer Workhorse Group Inc., had to postpone earnings releases this week. Richemont has since filed its report.
PVH Corp., the apparel conglomerate that owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, announced Thursday in internal company emails and stock exchange filings that it would cut about 4% of its global workforce. Some of the difficult conversations, scheduled to start in Asia on Friday morning, did not take place because of the outages, leaving employees uncertain of their future at the company, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to describe private matters. PVH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The outage shows the ubiquity of Microsoft’s email, chat and corporate software and is another example of the risks of having a single point of failure on the internet. While most technology glitches are fixed quickly, faulty updates and server troubles at one key technology provider can ripple across the global economy. A 15-hour disruption at Amazon Web Services last year hit hundreds of websites. A faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. in 2024 grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.
Users in more than 70 countries reported problems accessing Microsoft’s products, according to Downdetector, which recorded hundreds of thousands of complaints. Cybersecurity software, file-sharing services and administrator tools, were also disrupted. The company sells those products, along with workplace staples like Word and Excel, in a bundle under the M365 brand.
In the UK, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ warned patients that email was offline, though the London hospital’s procedures were going ahead as planned. A number of local police forces also said they couldn’t take crime reports online, according to the Guardian newspaper.
Traders in Singapore, Indian brokerages and officials in Tokyo also reported issues with Microsoft services on Friday. Euronext sent a warning that its email communications were unavailable.
Japan’s finance ministry said in a statement that it had been unable to receive emails for most of the day. Without access to their email, government ministries resorted to pinning up paper notices to inform journalists about daily schedules.
Staffers at the Reserve Bank of Australia were also impacted, with Outlook down across departments at the bank, but critical operations ran normally. In New Zealand, immigration officials paused the processing of all visa applications.
Photo: Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg