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UPDATE 12pm PT November 13, 2026:Microsoft has apologized after what it described as a “technical issue” resulted in a global system outage affecting Outlook, Teams, and more.
The company published the update on social media, explaining that the “incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.” Microsoft has since begun restoring services to those affected.
Services will continue to be restored gradually, with the company admitting that, while the process has taken time, “it helped ensure a stable restoration.” A post-incident report will be shared at a later time. You can see the full statement below.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.
“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.
“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.
“We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.”
ORIGINAL STORY 2am PT November 13, 2026:Microsoft is struggling to fix a prolonged systems outage that has hindered access to online services, including Outlook and Teams.
On the upside, AI tool Copilot has also been impacted.
For more than 12 hours, users around the world have been reporting an inability to access email accounts, instant messaging systems, and documentsoffline, however
Microsoft was quick to acknowledge the problem and admit that it was suffering from issues with its server capabilities, with “elevated load across multiple regions.” Attempts to solve this were initially unsuccessful, however, as the company reported its fixes were “not taking as expected.”
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in a lengthy thread on X/Twitter. “We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”
Hours later, Microsoft seemed to have changed tack and was now trying to carve out the impacted servers completely as it struggled to make progress.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the company then stated. “We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”
Why is this happening? Microsoft has blamed a number of servers becoming “unexpectedly unavailable”, adding strain to its remaining capacity, rather than any sudden increase in traffic. That would suggest this is not a targeted DDOS attack, and indeed, Microsoft exec Charles LaManna has confirmed “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
We’ll update again when there’s been further developments. In the meantime, hopefully you’re having a quiet day at work or school.
Photo Illustration by Scott Olson/
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