November 13, 2026

​A major Microsoft cloud outage disrupted Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 services for workers across multiple regions starting Thursday, with residual recovery stretching into Friday morning.

​The disruption began late Thursday morning when Microsoft first flagged connectivity problems for Teams users in North America. While engineers deployed an initial fix for Teams, a broader cascading failure soon hit Exchange Online—the backend system powering Outlook mailboxes. According to Microsoft’s service health updates, users in the Americas were initially unable to access mail through multiple connection methods before the issue expanded to impact Microsoft 365 users globally.

​Outage-tracking site Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 problem reports at the outage’s peak around 1:15 p.m. ET on Thursday from users who were locked out of their inboxes or unable to send and receive messages.

​To stabilize the infrastructure, Microsoft halted non-essential software deployments, rerouted network traffic away from overloaded servers, and applied a patch to an upstream authentication and routing component. By Friday morning, Microsoft reported sustained improvements in service availability with email queues returning toward normal levels, adding that it found no evidence of malicious activity. 

Source: https://abcnews.com/US/outlook-down-microsoft-outage-reported-mail/story?id=138088203