Microsoft 365 Global Outage Passes 18 Hours as Outlook, Teams and Copilot Remain Degraded

• Dispatched: Nov 13, 2026 · 05:38 ET (10:38 UTC)

One-sentence summary: Microsoft 365 has been down worldwide since 11:17 ET / 16:17 UTC on November 12, 2026, affecting 14 services including Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams and Copilot; as of 05:35 ET / 10:35 UTC on November 13, the service was still listed as degraded, with Microsoft yet to publish a root cause or a time for full recovery.

Verification status: ✓ Official first-party disclosure (Microsoft Service Health status page, incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821) / corroborated by Reuters

Core Facts & Consensus Delta:

Microsoft opened Exchange Online incident EX1550543 at 11:17 ET / 16:17 UTC on November 12, 2026, followed at about 13:27 ET / 18:27 UTC by MO1550821, covering the wider Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft confirmed that a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks, shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure, and said the elevated load was not driven by a traffic surge. The company also said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident, and it has not yet published a root cause.

Measured by user reports, the disruption peaked with more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports in the United States at about 13:00 ET / 18:00 UTC on November 12, alongside more than 45,000 reports against Microsoft 365. By 17:47 ET / 22:47 UTC that day, Microsoft 365 reports had fallen to about 13,000 and Teams reports to 763, but Outlook reports still exceeded 25,000 at 21:30 ET / 02:30 UTC on November 13. As of 05:35 ET / 10:35 UTC on November 13, Microsoft's official status page still showed service degradation, with the next update scheduled for 07:30 ET / 12:30 UTC. Microsoft has disclosed no affected customer count and no financial impact, and no monetary figures have been officially disclosed.

Supply-Chain & Market Read-Through: Microsoft 365 is the core product of Microsoft's Productivity and Business Processes segment, Exchange Online carries enterprise email, calendars and contacts, and Copilot is the company's flagship AI product. The transmission path is concrete and direct: the loss of email and meeting collaboration forced customers onto fallback channels, and government agencies including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police were affected. Reuters reported that OpenAI and Anthropic have both reported problems with their Microsoft 365 integrations, showing the outage reaching into the daily operations of leading AI companies. Electric truck maker Workhorse postponed its third-quarter results release, originally scheduled for November 12, to November 16, citing the global outage. Microsoft's status page showed no Azure-wide issue, indicating the fault is concentrated on the Microsoft 365 side rather than spreading to the cloud infrastructure backbone. The recovery process itself is a risk factor: Microsoft said servers returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic, and it is rebuilding a subset of servers using a previous configuration to test whether that prevents the failures, so recovery is gradual rather than a single switch-on.

Next Catalysts & Watchpoints:

• Microsoft Service Health status page, next update: 07:30 ET / 12:30 UTC on November 13, 2026 — watch whether the service-degradation notice is lifted.
• Microsoft has said it will publish a post-incident report once the problem is fully resolved; check the root cause and affected scope against the preliminary account.

Sources:

• Reuters (via BusinessWorld) (Published: 2026-11-13 01:15 ET / 06:15 UTC; site timestamp shown in local time, 14:15)
• Microsoft Service Health status page (Last updated: 2026-11-13 02:29 ET / 07:29 UTC)
• PulsAPI check of Microsoft's official status page (Checked: 2026-11-13 05:35 ET / 10:35 UTC)

Information only, not investment advice.