Key facts
- Microsoft said the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade.
- Outage reports came from users in more than 70 countries and territories, per Downdetector.
- Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot were interrupted, users reported.
- Governments including Japan, Singapore and Australia reported effects on some operations.
- Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.
Microsoft said on November 14, 2026 that it had restored service to the remaining customers and regions affected by a Microsoft 365 outage, which it described as one of the worst IT failures in years. On its Microsoft 365 status page, the company said: "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions." It directed users to reference MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center for further updates.
The disruption affected governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines and banks in many places. The governments of Japan, Singapore and Australia reported that the hours-long episode had affected some of their operations. In the UK, hospital staff resorted to paper records and courtrooms sought fax machines, according to the report.
Users reported interruptions to Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant. Downdetector said it received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories, and that reports came from 74 countries and territories within an hour of the first problems. Microsoft says on its website that more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps.
Problems started appearing at about midday on November 12 in the US and 6pm in the UK. Microsoft apologized on November 13 and said the outage was "not related to cyber" or artificial intelligence agents. It said the incident "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced" after a recent network change.
Tim Clement-Jones, a former chair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, said the outages of vital government services were an "I-told-you-so moment" highlighting Britain's dependence on US tech. Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow's school of computing science, said: "This problem serves to emphasise the dependence we have built on one company's digital infrastructure, and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem."
The total number of people affected was not clear. Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.