Key facts
- Microsoft said recovery was still uneven and it had no evidence of malicious activity.
- Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said SharePoint was slow but Outlook and Teams were fully operational.
- A Council of the EU official said Outlook and Teams were working on its side.
- The European Parliament's press service said it was unaffected and monitoring as a precaution.
- Downdetector reported issues in at least 74 countries, with nearly 140,000 Outlook reports at peak.
- Schleswig-Holstein moved about 40,000 mailboxes to open-source alternatives in 2025.
The European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament said on November 13, 2026 that a Microsoft outage disrupting Outlook, Teams and Copilot left their operations largely unaffected. The outage started on Thursday, November 12, 2026, with internet traffic monitoring site Downdetector reporting issues in at least 74 countries and nearly 140,000 Outlook problem reports at its peak.
Microsoft said on the morning of Friday, November 13, 2026 that recovery was still uneven. "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation," it said.
At the European Commission, spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO the impact was "very limited and does not affect our operations," with a "minor impact on a limited number of applications, such as the slowness of SharePoint." Outlook and Teams were "fully operational," he said. A Council of the EU official said Outlook and Teams were "working on our side," declining to give more details on the institution's IT setup. The Parliament's press service said in a statement it was unaffected and was monitoring the situation as a precaution.
The outage is exposing the reliance of companies and governments on Microsoft services, a longstanding concern in Europe among proponents of keeping more control over IT and digital infrastructure. In October last year, a similar outage of Amazon Web Services servers prompted calls for Europe to boost its tech sovereignty.
Efforts to move away from American tech providers got a boost in the past two years due to concerns that the U.S. administration of Donald Trump could disrupt digital services in Europe for political gain. Germany's northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein in 2025 moved about 40,000 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives. Its digitalization minister, Dirk Schrödter, said on Friday that disruptions like the Microsoft outage "must be taken very seriously," whether the state uses open-source software or products from individual providers. "We must be able to intervene ourselves at any time if problems arise," he said.