Microsoft 365 suffers biggest outage in 12 months as reports top 7m

Detailed summary

Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity ecosystem has suffered its largest outage in 12 months, attracting more than seven million user-submitted disruption reports ...

Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity ecosystem has suffered its largest outage in 12 months, attracting more than seven million user-submitted disruption reports as problems with Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services persisted for about 20 hours across different regions of the world.

Data from Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions through reports submitted by users, showed that the November 12 outage was the largest recorded incident involving Microsoft services in the past year and the biggest outage across all monitored services in 2026 as of November 13.

The scale of the disruption was approximately 2.5 times that of YouTube’s February 2026 outage, previously the largest incident recorded on Downdetector during the period under review.

Outlook alone generated more reports than any other service outage recorded over the past 12 months, highlighting the extent to which the disruption affected Microsoft’s email infrastructure, a critical communication channel for businesses, government institutions and individuals.

Unlike most major technology outages, which typically experience a sharp increase in complaints before fading within a few hours, Microsoft’s disruption remained elevated for approximately 20 hours.

This was more than twice the duration of other major outages recorded during the period, with the longest comparable incident sustaining elevated reports for about nine hours.

The figures underline the growing operational exposure of organisations that rely on a small number of technology providers for email, meetings, document management, collaboration and other essential business functions.

The disruption continued to generate fresh complaints as different regions entered their working hours, extending its impact beyond the initial markets affected when the outage began.

Downdetector data showed that outage reports increased between 8am and 11am local time on Friday, November 13, coinciding with the busiest period for many…

Opening of the article, excerpted from BusinessDay. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.