Microsoft 365, Outlook down for thousands of users
Microsoft attributed the connectivity issues to "elevated load" on its infrastructure across multiple regions.
Microsoft logo in this illustration taken November 6, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Microsoft Outlook suffered a major outage Thursday (Nov 12), with tens of thousands of users struggling to access their email as the company said it was working "aggressively" to reduce the impact.
Microsoft attributed the connectivity issues to "elevated load" on its infrastructure across multiple regions. The disruption also appeared to affect other Microsoft products.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later said it had "confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region".
Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (6pm GMT).
Outage reports have since declined, with about 50,000 users reporting experiencing issues with Outlook as of 4.30pm Eastern Time.
Downdetector also recorded more than 38,000 user reports of problems with Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams.
"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," Microsoft wrote on X.
"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it said.
"We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service.
Microsoft said earlier in the day it had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users in North America and that the impact had been fully resolved. The company later said the issue may also affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in other regions.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
