The global Microsoft 365 outage continues, meaning users are currently unable to access email and are faced with disrupting of other disrupting features in Teams, Copilot, and other services. Microsoft says recovery efforts are underway and are making progress.
The issues began yesterday, Thursday, November 12, when nearly 130,000 Outlook reports were recorded on Downdetector shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern, and continued into the night and now this morning, reports the Associated Press. The disruption impacted both businesses and government operations, with Japan confirming a significant impact on government IT systems.
Exchange Online appears to be at the center of the problems. Microsoft’s service health page says affected users may have trouble opening mailboxes through Outlook on the web, desktop, and mobile. Messages may also be delayed.
Exchange accounts accessed through other clients such as Apple Mail are also experiencing problems because the disruption lies in Microsoft’s underlying infrastructure. It is also disrupting third-party AI services that connect to Microsoft accounts.
From the Microsoft service health page:
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.
More info: Features of the Microsoft 365 services below that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional.– Exchange Online: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed.– Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be unable to load some admin center pages.– Microsoft 365 apps: Users may be unable to view their recently used files.– Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory are affected.– Microsoft 365 Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.– Microsoft Copilot 365: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.– Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Some Defender for Office 365 experiences that rely on Purview DLP/Information Protection signals may experience delays or failures in policy evaluation and governance action enforcement. Admins/SOCs may experience delays or failures when accessing NHI features that rely on Data Classification Sensitivity Labels, including Tenant Metrics, Policy, and Data Usage, across the Identity, OAuth, and App Governance pages in the Security portal on Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.– Microsoft Defender XDR: Users may be unable to load Microsoft Defender portal pages or solution tabs.– Microsoft Fabric: Users may encounter failures when exporting reports with sensitivity labels to PDF or PowerPoint, when updating artifacts with sensitivity labels, or opening pbix with sensitivity label in Power BI Desktop. As a workaround, users can remove the sensitivity label from the affected item to complete the operation, if their organization’s data protection policies allow it.– Microsoft Graph: API requests that access Exchange Online data, such as mail, calendar, and contacts, may time out and prevent users from managing Teams, Channels, Membership, Apps management and send activity notifications using Graph API.– Microsoft Intune: Scenarios including device enrollment, device check-in, and device compliance policies may have been intermittently impacted.– Microsoft Planner: Users are experiencing Plan and Task operation reliability issues.– Microsoft Power Apps: Users may be intermittently unable to sign-in to the Power Apps or Field Service mobile apps. Affected users may be able to utilize Power Apps or Field Service on the web as a way to circumvent impact, and users who are already signed in can potentially avoid impact by not signing out, clearing app data, or reinstalling while the issue is ongoing.– Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, auto-labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) across Microsoft 365 services, Communication Compliance, Information Protection label and auto-labeling policies, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Data Classification are impacted, and users may be unable to open or load Microsoft Purview portal pages or protected content. Audit searches, protected content creation, eDiscovery tasks such as search and export, Data Classification and On Demand Scan features may also be impacted.– Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels.– Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.– Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.– SharePoint Online: Some users may experience issues when sharing SharePoint Online files with people outside their organization, where external sharing is permitted by both organization-level and site-level settings. Additionally, features that depend on Exchange Online may be impacted. Accessing files stored directly in SharePoint Online remains functional.– Universal Print: Users may encounter errors submitting print jobs or using admin features.– Windows 365: Customers who have configured their tenant and Cloud PCs to use Microsoft Purview Customer Key for Windows 365 Cloud PCs may have users who are unable to connect to their Cloud PCs.Current Status: We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements now observed in North America and sustained improvements across much of Europe. We’re also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure.Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in the remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs. We’re closely monitoring service consistency and validating recovery across different connection methods as we work toward full mitigation.At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft Teams is not entirely offline. Microsoft says that most calling, meeting, and messaging functions remain available, but users may encounter errors when scheduling meetings, handling invitations, or editing calendar entries. Some contact and channel management features are also affected.
Microsoft’s latest update said repairs across parts of the Asia Pacific region were improving mailbox access and helping delayed emails move through the system.
We’ve made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored. We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent…
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026
Microsoft has increased the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while backlogs clear.
Microsoft also says that so far, no evidence of malicious activity has been discovered.
