The Microsoft 365 Outage of November 2026: What Happened and What to Do Next

Last updated: November 13, 2026, 10:15 a.m. Central. This is an ongoing incident. I will update this page as Microsoft posts new information.

Microsoft 365 went down worldwide on Thursday, November 12, 2026, and was still recovering on Friday morning. Outlook and Exchange Online email were hit hardest, with Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender also affected. Microsoft says it has no evidence of a cyberattack and has not yet named a root cause.

The short answer

• What broke: mailbox access in Outlook on the web, desktop and mobile, plus delayed email delivery. Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR were listed in the same incident. TechCrunch also reported that some administrators could not reach their Intune dashboards.
• Incident numbers: EX1550543 for Exchange Online and MO1550821 for the wider Microsoft 365 incident, as shown in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Was it an attack? Microsoft says no evidence points that way. Its status page said: "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident."
• Where it stands now: email queues were "approaching normal levels" by about 8 a.m. Central on Friday, according to CNBC, but Microsoft still expected intermittent problems and had not given a time for full recovery.

What happened, in Central time

Times below are converted to Central from the times each outlet published. Reports differ by up to an hour on when the trouble started, so treat the early times as approximate.

What Microsoft has said about the cause, and what it has not

Microsoft has described the mechanism, not the root cause. It said the heavy load on its systems was not driven by more traffic. A number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the rest, and a process that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed. It is rolling back a recent network configuration change, but it has not said that change caused the outage. Microsoft says it will publish a full post-incident report with the root cause after the fix is complete.

Everything beyond that is reported, not confirmed. Australia's Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft told him it did not believe a cyberattack was involved and compared the event to the faulty CrowdStrike update of 2024, as reported by CNBC and Al Jazeera. Microsoft has not confirmed that comparison. Until the post-incident report is out, I would not plan around any single theory.

What this costs a small business that runs on Microsoft 365

For a small company, Microsoft 365 is rarely just email. It is the inbox where quotes and invoices go out, the calendar that holds client meetings, the Teams link for the 2 p.m. call, the SharePoint folder with the signed contract, and often the sign-in for other tools. ABC News in Australia reported that some users could not receive two-factor codes, which locked them out of services that had nothing to do with Microsoft.

I will not put a dollar figure on it, because nobody has a reliable one yet. You can work out your own: people who could not work normally, times hours lost, times what each hour costs you. Then add what you cannot see on a timesheet: a proposal that missed a deadline, a client who could not reach you, a payment that waited. For most small teams that number is large enough to justify an afternoon of planning.

A continuity plan for the next outage

You cannot stop a cloud provider from failing. You can decide in advance what your team does in the first 15 minutes.

1. Pick a second channel for the team, on a different vendor. A group text, Signal or WhatsApp group, or a Slack or Google Chat space. It must not sign in through your Microsoft account. Test it once a quarter.
2. Know where to check status. Bookmark Microsoft's public status page at status.cloud.microsoft and the Microsoft 365 Status account on X. If you are the admin, Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center shows the incident numbers and details for your tenant.
3. Keep critical contacts reachable offline. Your top clients, vendors, bank and insurance contacts should live in your phone's own contacts and on one printed or exported sheet, not only in Outlook.
4. Keep critical documents reachable offline. Turn on Cached Exchange Mode in desktop Outlook so recent mail stays on the computer. In OneDrive, mark the folders you cannot work without as always kept on this device. Keep current contracts, price sheets and your emergency plan in a second place.
5. Plan for email continuity. Some email security services offer a standby mailbox during a provider outage. Weigh the cost against what a day without email costs you. At a minimum, know that mail sent to you usually queues and retries, and Microsoft extended that window to 48 hours this time.
6. Have a client message ready. Write it now, store it outside Microsoft, and send it from the second channel: "Our email provider is having a global outage. If you need us today, call or text this number. Nothing you sent is lost." Point your website's contact form at an address that does not depend on the same provider.
7. Watch for scams. Outages bring fake "reset your password" and "verify your account" emails. Remind the team that you will never ask for a password in a message.

What to automate, and what never to put on one vendor

Automation helps most in the first hour, when nobody is sure what is happening. These are good candidates:

• A check that watches your provider's status feed and posts to the team's second channel when an incident opens or closes.
• Prepared client and staff messages that one person can send with one action.
• A nightly export of contacts and key files to a second location.

Some things should never depend on a single vendor: the way your team reaches each other, the list of people you must contact, your backups, and the way you sign in to everything else. An AI agent can do the watching and drafting for you, but it should run on a separate path from the system it is watching. We build this kind of setup in our AI automation and operations work, and our security page tracks incidents like this one.

What to do today

• Check Service health or status.cloud.microsoft before telling clients anything is fixed.
• Look for delayed or bounced email and resend anything time sensitive.
• Message clients who may have been waiting on you.
• Set up a second team channel if you do not have one.
• Put your top 20 contacts in your phone's own contacts.
• Mark your most important OneDrive folders as kept on this device.
• Write your outage message and store it outside Microsoft.
• Put a 30 minute review on next week's calendar to read Microsoft's post-incident report.

If you want help turning this into a written plan for your team, start here.

Questions people ask

Was the November 2026 Microsoft 365 outage a cyberattack?

Microsoft says it has no evidence of malicious activity. Its status page said: "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." It has not yet published a root cause.

What caused the Microsoft 365 outage on November 12, 2026?

Microsoft has not confirmed a root cause. It said many servers became unexpectedly unavailable and a process that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed, and it began rolling back a recent network configuration change. It has promised a full post-incident report once the fix is complete.

Is Microsoft 365 working again?

As of Friday morning, November 13, Microsoft reported email queues approaching normal levels but still expected intermittent problems and gave no time for full recovery. Check status.cloud.microsoft or Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center for the current state.

Did I lose emails during the Microsoft outage?

Most mail sent to you should arrive late rather than be lost. Microsoft extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages. Check for bounces and resend anything urgent you sent during the outage.

How can a small business keep working when Microsoft 365 is down?

Keep a team channel on a different vendor, store key contacts in your phone and key files offline, know where to check status, and have a client message written and stored outside Microsoft before you need it.

Sources

1. Microsoft service health status
2. SecurityWeek: Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Outlook, Exchange Online and Teams
3. BleepingComputer: Massive Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook, Teams, Copilot worldwide
4. CNBC: Microsoft outage continues, Outlook and other 365 services down
5. Al Jazeera: Microsoft hit by global outages, what happened and why?
6. TechCrunch: Microsoft's latest email outage turned into a full blown global cloud crisis
7. ABC News (Australia): Access to Microsoft Outlook and other services being restored
8. ABC News (Australia): Microsoft access being restored after global Outlook, Teams disruptions
9. Wikipedia: 2026 Microsoft outage