Microsoft 365 Outage, November 2026: Timeline and Impact

On 12 November 2026 at 18:32 UTC, Microsoft posted an incident titled "Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services" on its public status site. More than seventeen hours later the incident was still open, the list of affected services had grown from five to twenty, and a second incident had appeared on the consumer side covering Outlook.com, OneDrive and Teams.

This is a working postmortem built only from what Microsoft has published on status.cloud.microsoft. Microsoft has said it will publish a full Post-Incident Report with root cause after mitigation is complete. Until then, the root cause is not public, and anything below marked as Microsoft's view is quoted or paraphrased from its own posts. We will update this page when the report is out.

TL;DR

• What: a Microsoft 365 service degradation centred on Exchange Online. Mailbox access through Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync and REST connections failed for some users, and email delivery was delayed.
• When: first posted 12 November 2026, 18:32 UTC. Still ongoing as of 13 November 2026, 12:13 UTC.
• Scope: Microsoft lists 20 business services, from Exchange Online, Teams and Copilot to Purview, Intune and Windows 365, mostly the features that depend on Exchange Online. A separate consumer incident covers Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web.
• Cause so far: Microsoft described affected infrastructure "experiencing elevated load across multiple regions" and said it had "no evidence of malicious activity". It has not yet published a root cause.
• Status: recovering region by region. Microsoft reports encouraging progress in Europe, North America improving and Japan comparatively more stable, with some users still seeing intermittent issues. Email backlogs are being worked down under an extended 48-hour email timeout window.

Timeline (UTC)

Times come from the timestamps on Microsoft's own status posts and from the times we read them.

• 12 Nov, 18:32: Microsoft publishes "Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services", status Service degradation. It lists five potentially impacted services: Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR. Next update promised by 20:30 UTC.
• 12 Nov, ~18:45: Microsoft's separate consumer status feed still shows every consumer service, Outlook.com included, as Operational.
• 13 Nov, 10:01: the business incident is updated and is still in Service degradation.
• 13 Nov, 11:04: Microsoft publishes a new update under the same title. The affected list now covers 20 services. Recovery actions are complete across portions of the affected infrastructure in Asia Pacific, and traffic is being gradually restored there. Next update promised by 12:00 UTC.
• 13 Nov, by 11:21: the consumer feed now shows Microsoft 365 (Consumer) in Service degradation, titled "Users may be unable to access or perform several actions in Microsoft 365 services". It names Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web. Next consumer update promised by 12:30 UTC.
• 13 Nov, 11:55: the consumer incident is updated: recovery efforts are progressing while Microsoft works to pinpoint the source. Next consumer update promised by 14:30 UTC.
• 13 Nov, 12:00: the business incident is updated. Microsoft reports encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and email delivery improving; North America is also improving and Japan is comparatively more stable, though some users may still see intermittent issues. Next update promised by 13:00 UTC.
• 13 Nov, 12:13: both incidents still open at the time of writing.

What Microsoft has said about the cause

In its first post on 12 November, Microsoft said it had "determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions", which was "likely contributing to the connectivity errors". Its stated actions were:

• restarting and repairing impacted portions of that infrastructure to restore capacity;
• reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic, to see whether it was contributing to the load;
• evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure.

By the 13 November update, the focus had moved to recovery. Microsoft said recovery actions were complete in parts of Asia Pacific and were being extended to other regions, alongside "stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity". It also said it had no evidence of malicious activity and would share a full Post-Incident Report "with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete".

What is not public yet: what the specific type of traffic was, why the load built up across several regions at once, and what the total duration and number of affected tenants were. Treat any root cause you read elsewhere before the Post-Incident Report as speculation.

Affected services

Microsoft's framing is that the features which talk to Exchange Online and email services are impacted, while "elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional". The 13 November list:

• Exchange Online: mailbox access may fail through Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync and REST connections, and delivery may be delayed.
• Microsoft Teams: calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages largely work. Calendar features fail: scheduling, invites, viewing and meeting edits. So does creating Live or Virtual events and creating or deleting private or shared channels.
• Microsoft Graph: API requests that touch Exchange Online data (mail, calendar, contacts) may time out. That breaks Teams management and activity notifications sent through Graph.
• Microsoft Copilot 365: Copilot Chat may not load or respond, and Copilot may be unable to reach work email, calendar and files.
• SharePoint Online: external sharing and Exchange-dependent features may fail. Accessing files stored in SharePoint still works.
• Microsoft Purview: DLP, auto-labeling, Information Protection, Communication Compliance, RBAC, Data Classification, audit search and eDiscovery may be impacted.
• Also listed: Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft 365 apps (recent files), Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center, Microsoft 365 Education, Defender for Office 365, Defender XDR, Microsoft Fabric, Intune, Planner, Power Apps mobile sign-in, Power BI label exports, Microsoft To Do, Universal Print, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs that use Purview Customer Key.

On the consumer side, Microsoft names Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web, and adds that "you may also see issues in other Microsoft 365 services".

What it meant in practice

For most organisations this showed up as email: Outlook failing to connect, mail sitting in queues, and phones failing to sync over ActiveSync. Because so much of Microsoft 365 reads from Exchange, the impact spread beyond email. Meeting invites could not be scheduled in Teams, Copilot could not see calendars or mail, and compliance tooling could not evaluate policies.

Integrations were hit too. Any internal tool that reads mailboxes or calendars through Microsoft Graph, such as helpdesk mail ingestion, calendar-based on-call handoffs or meeting bots, would have seen timeouts. Those failures can look like a bug in your own code.

Microsoft has extended the email timeout window to 48 hours so that delayed messages are retried rather than bounced. Expect mail to keep arriving late for a while after the incident is marked mitigated, and avoid asking people to resend: that adds duplicates to queues that are already backed up.

Current status

As of 13 November 2026, 12:13 UTC, both the business and consumer incidents are in Service degradation. Microsoft's 12:00 UTC update reports encouraging recovery in Europe, improvement in North America and comparatively more stable service in Japan, with some users still seeing intermittent issues. Reducing email queues remains a priority. Live status is on Pagerly's free Microsoft 365 status page, the Outlook status page (Outlook.com plus Exchange Online) and the Outlook.com status page.

For what engineering and IT teams can take from this incident, see Microsoft 365 outage: lessons for SaaS dependency response, and for the failure pattern behind outages like this, when failover overloads the fleet.