On Thursday, November 12, a massive outage hit Microsoft's cloud services, causing disruptions for thousands of users globally. The glitches primarily affected the Outlook mail platform, as well as the communication tool Teams, the AI assistant Copilot, and other components of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. According to the monitoring service Downdetector, which aggregates user reports, the outage was particularly noticeable in the Americas, although complaints were also recorded in other regions.
Scale of the outage according to Downdetector
The peak of complaints occurred in the middle of the day according to US Eastern Time. Around 1:30 PM local time (7:30 PM Italian time), more than 120,000 users reported difficulties with Outlook, and later, according to Downdetector, the number of reports exceeded 130,000. Major issues included inability to log into mailboxes, send or receive emails, as well as delays in email delivery. Separate outages were recorded in Microsoft 365 — reported by over 46,000 users — as well as in Teams, which is widely used in corporate environments: about 3,000 people claimed difficulties with access. Complaints also came from users of Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.
Microsoft's response and recovery measures
The company confirmed it is investigating the causes of the outage. In a series of updates on X, Microsoft initially stated it received reports from users unable to access Exchange Online mailboxes through various connection methods in the Americas. In a subsequent statement, the company pointed to a probable cause: a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing higher-than-normal load, which, it estimated, caused connection errors. To mitigate the impact, Microsoft announced the redirection of traffic between infrastructure nodes to level out the load and restore connectivity. Separately, the company noted that Teams service in North America had been restored, although some users continued to report connection difficulties.
Caveats and context
Microsoft did not immediately provide a full assessment of the number of affected users and did not disclose all details regarding the causes of the outage. It is important to note that Downdetector figures reflect the number of user reports and not necessarily the actual number of affected individuals, as a single person may submit multiple complaints. Outages in Microsoft services are not an isolated episode: previously, in August 2026, according to the same Downdetector, multi-hour outages were recorded in GitHub, Copilot, and Teams, pointing to the recurring nature of such incidents in the company's cloud infrastructure. At the time of publication, Microsoft was continuing its work to stabilize the services.
