Outlook outage, 12–13 November 2026: what happened and what to do

What happened

On Thursday 12 November 2026, people around the world found they couldn't get into Outlook. Mailboxes wouldn't open on the web, in the desktop app or on phones, and the mail that did get through often turned up hours late. It didn't clear overnight either. The trouble carried on through the Asian working day on Friday and was still there when Europe and the US started work.

Nobody agrees on exactly when it started. Al Jazeera says about 16:00 GMT. CNBC says just before 1 p.m. Eastern, which is closer to 18:00 GMT.

Outlook took the worst of it, but it wasn't alone. CNBC and TechCrunch both list Teams, SharePoint and Copilot as disrupted, and TechCrunch adds Office for the web and consumer OneDrive. Al Jazeera's picture of Teams is milder: it says chats and calls mostly kept working. Anything that plugs into Outlook mail or calendars was dragged down too.

The scale was big. Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had reports from 74 countries and territories. By 07:00 GMT on Friday it had logged at least 43,000 complaints about Outlook from 72 countries, according to Al Jazeera, and that only counts the people who bothered to report. Microsoft hasn't said how many users were hit.

The effects spread well beyond inboxes. CNBC reports that parts of the NHS were affected (patients were told to turn up to appointments as usual), Air India had to reroute its email, and Workhorse Group pushed its quarterly results from 12 to 16 November. Al Jazeera adds government systems in Singapore and Japan, the Supreme Court of the Philippines and the Australian federal police.

What caused it

So far, Microsoft is describing a capacity problem rather than an attack. In updates quoted by CNBC, it says a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed too much load onto the ones still running. Some were also failing Microsoft's own automated health checks.

Charles Lamanna, an executive vice president at Microsoft, said late on Thursday that there was no sign of malicious or cyber activity, Al Jazeera reports.

We don't have a root cause yet. On Friday Microsoft said it was rolling back a network change, but it didn't say whether that change caused the problem. The Australian minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had described the incident to him as something like the CrowdStrike failure, an update that went wrong. That's his account; Microsoft hasn't said it publicly.

There's also a small contradiction in the reporting. CNBC says Microsoft first pointed to a surge in traffic in one part of its infrastructure, while Al Jazeera says Microsoft was clear the extra load didn't come from more traffic.

How the recovery is going

Here's what Microsoft says it has done, from the CNBC and TechCrunch coverage:

• Taken the affected systems offline and brought them back in stages
• Spread connection traffic across its infrastructure worldwide to even out the load
• Switched to a different way of checking server health, which got some servers back on Thursday, and set up automatic restarts for servers that stop responding
• Extended its email retry window to 48 hours, so delayed messages wait in the queue instead of being dropped

By Friday morning US time, Microsoft was reporting good progress in Europe, a gradual return in Asia Pacific and improvement in North America, according to CNBC. Al Jazeera, though, reported that some servers that had come back were failing again. When this page was last updated, no one was reporting the outage as fully fixed, and Microsoft was warning that service might come and go as apps reconnect.

Is Outlook down right now?

We last updated this page on 13 November 2026, while the recovery was still going on. For the current state, the Microsoft 365 status account on X (@MSFT365Status) is the quickest place to look. If you run a Microsoft 365 tenant, the Service health page in the admin center shows the incident as it affects your organisation.

What to do while Outlook is down

Mostly, wait it out, but a few things help. Don't keep resending messages: Microsoft is holding delayed mail for up to 48 hours, so something you've sent once will probably arrive once things recover, and resending just means duplicates. If you need an old email, try the desktop app, which can still show mail it downloaded before the outage. For anything that can't wait, pick up the phone or send a text.

If you're an admin, give people one place to check for updates and one backup way to reach each other. It saves your help desk from taking the same call all day.

What an email outage means for field teams

In utilities, smart meter rollouts and most other field work, a surprising amount still runs on email. Jobs go out as attachments. Approvals sit in a supervisor's inbox. The day's progress gets sent round as a spreadsheet, and problems get escalated by reply-all. So when email goes down, the crews can be ready to work and still have nothing to do.

An analyst quoted by Al Jazeera said organisations should plan for a "minimum viable service" during outages like this. For a field operation, that comes down to a few decisions you make before anything breaks:

• Send jobs to crews through the field app, so nobody has to email them a file.
• Keep approvals in the system rather than in someone's inbox.
• Make sure the field app records jobs, photos and GPS without a connection.
• Agree now which channel team leads use if email goes down, and keep their numbers somewhere other than Outlook.
• Report progress from live job data, not from emailed spreadsheets.

Where PIEBENCH fits

PIEBENCH keeps email out of the loop. Work orders go straight to crews' phones, the offline field app captures jobs, photos and GPS whether there's signal or not, and supervisors approve submissions inside the platform. Progress, overdue jobs and team performance all come from the field data itself. If you want the full picture, start with smart meter field operations, or browse our field operations guides.