Microsoft Hit by Major Global Outage: Outlook, Teams and more offline
Microsoft is trying to fix a major global outage that took down a wide range of its services, leaving businesses, government departments and millions of users desperately cut off.
The disruption, which began on Thursday afternoon, has affected Microsoft’s widely used Outlook email service, Teams, Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 applications. Some users have been unable to access their inboxes, send or receive emails, retrieve files or use calendar functions.
The scale of the disruption has been considerable. According to outage-monitoring website Downdetector, reports of Outlook problems peaked at nearly 140,000 globally on Thursday evening.
Microsoft’s attempts to fix the problem have so far met with limited success. The company has acknowledged that large numbers of servers unexpectedly became unavailable, placing excessive demands on the remaining infrastructure and creating further connectivity problems.
Microsoft says the resulting elevated server loads have made recovery particularly difficult. Attempts to introduce fixes and redistribute traffic have not worked as effectively as anticipated, although engineers continue to work on restoring capacity.
The company has also stressed that it has found no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity.
The consequences extend well beyond individual users. Businesses, public services and government organisations have experienced disruption, with the UK’s NHS among those affected. Some healthcare organisations have advised patients to telephone rather than rely on email communications. Police forces have also reported problems receiving online reports and email enquiries.
The incident has also highlighted the extent to which organisations have become dependent on Microsoft’s cloud-based infrastructure for everyday operations.
For now, Microsoft has not provided a definitive timetable for a full restoration of services. Although there have been some signs of progress, the company continues to face difficulties stabilising its systems and returning them to normal operating capacity.
The bigger question is whether this outage exposes a serious weakness in the world’s growing dependence on a handful of major technology providers. When one company’s infrastructure experiences a major failure, the consequences can spread across businesses, public services and international communications remarkably quickly.
Source: BBC News, 13 November 2026.
Tom
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Well there you have it. One of the largest closed source tech companies being taken to the woodshed. What? They forgot to pay their security bills? Anything digital can be hacked.
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