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Microsoft 365 outage: Outlook, Teams and OneDrive down (12-13 November 2026)

Since Thursday afternoon, 12 November 2026, Microsoft 365 has been failing for people around the world. Work and school mailboxes in Outlook would not load, Teams calendars broke, and 22 Microsoft products were listed as affected, from OneDrive and SharePoint to Copilot, Intune and Defender. As of 07:29 UTC on Friday 13 November Microsoft says its latest fix is working on part of its servers, but the outage is not over and there is no time for a full fix.

By the Is It Up or Down team. Published 13 November 2026, updated 07:29 UTC on Friday 13 November. Microsoft incident MO1550821 (first alert EX1550543).

What is down

Microsoft's summary: "Features of the Microsoft 365 services below that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional." In practice that means anything that touches email, calendars or contacts. Each product has its own page with Microsoft's exact words, what still works and what to do:

Also affected: OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Microsoft Graph, Windows 365, Universal Print, Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft 365 Education.

Personal accounts were hit too. Microsoft's consumer status says: "We're pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the source of the issue and ensure the recovery of the affected environment. This issue impacts Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web although you may also see issues in other Microsoft 365 services."

What still works

• Teams chats, calls, meetings and standard channels, Microsoft says, as long as you join from a chat or meeting link rather than the Teams calendar.
• Files stored in SharePoint Online open normally, according to Microsoft (SharePoint outage page).
• Power Apps on the web, and mobile apps you are already signed in to.
• Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, has its own status page and was not part of this incident. Check it on our Microsoft status board.

Timeline

Times in UTC and US Eastern time. Official updates are Microsoft's own, from its posts on incident MO1550821.

What caused it

Microsoft has not given a root cause yet. Its updates, in order: elevated load on servers, then servers becoming unavailable; a "core process" on the affected servers overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity; that process identified as the one handling secure connections; a recent network configuration change being reverted; a surge of calls from routing services to backend servers; and finally a patch to an upstream authentication and routing component, which is the first fix it describes as working. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said it was not a cyberattack (reported by CIO&Leader), and Microsoft's own status says: "As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident."

Two things made this one long. Recovery came and went: servers that came back at 22:58 UTC stopped answering again once traffic returned, and a second recovery at 04:12 UTC did not hold either. And because Exchange Online sits underneath so much of Microsoft 365, one failing service spread to calendars in Teams, Copilot's access to mail and files, security tools like Defender and admin pages.

How big it was

• Outlook reports on Downdetector peaked at about 130,000 around 1 p.m. ET on 12 November (Techaeris counted 128,874 at 1:09 p.m.; Benzinga, citing Reuters, 138,058 around 1 p.m.).
• Microsoft 365 reports passed 47,000 around 1:20 p.m. ET.
• Reports came from 74 countries and territories.
• Affected organizations named in the news include the US House of Representatives, New Zealand's foreign ministry and embassies, Australian federal police, the NSW online bail court and Service NSW, and NYC Emergency Management. Air India rerouted its email, and Workhorse Group moved its quarterly results to 16 November.

Downdetector counts problem reports from people, not affected accounts; the real number of affected users is far higher.

What to do now

If you use Outlook, Teams or OneDrive at work or school

• It is not you. Do not reset your password, remove your account or reinstall Office: none of that fixes a Microsoft-side outage.
• Classic Outlook on a computer keeps a copy of mail it already downloaded, so older messages may still open.
• Join meetings from links in Teams chats; postpone creating new meetings and events.
• For urgent messages, use a phone call or Teams chat, which Microsoft says largely works.

If you are an IT admin

• Follow incident MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Health, Service health. If the admin center does not load (it is affected too), the public page status.cloud.microsoft and the Microsoft 365 Status account on X carry the same updates.
• Expect delayed mail delivery, failed quarantine releases, Intune enrollment and check-in errors, and Graph calls to mail and calendar timing out. Hold changes and rollouts until Microsoft reports recovery.
• Do not turn off Safe Links or other protection to get around errors; Microsoft lists them as part of the outage.

Questions

Sources

• Microsoft service health (status.cloud.microsoft)
• Cloud Admin Hub, MO1550821 updates with times
• BleepingComputer
• Techaeris
• Microsoft 365 Status on X
• CNBC
• Reuters, via The Korea Times
• ABC News (Australia) live blog
• ABC7 live updates
• Legal IT Insider
• Benzinga
• RTÉ
• CIO&Leader
• ITdaily

We will update this post as Microsoft posts updates and when it publishes its post-incident report. For live status at any time: Is Microsoft down?

Is It Up or Down is independent and not affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, Outlook, Teams and the other product names are trademarks of Microsoft, used here only to identify the products.