Microsoft Outlook, Teams outage eases after over a day; recovery timeline uncertain

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The company was not aware of any malicious activity and ruled out AI as the cause. Read more at straitstimes.com.

The US tech company was not aware of any malicious activity and ruled out AI as the cause.

A global outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams eased on Nov 13 after more than 24 hours of disruption crippled online communications across businesses and governments, though the company said it still had no timeline for full recovery of services.

Microsoft blamed server issues for the incident that also affected its Copilot AI assistant, and said that a broader roll-out of software fixes was stabilising the system. It was not aware of any malicious activity and ruled out artificial intelligence as the cause.

Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending e-mails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.

It affected government agencies from Australia and Japan to the US, caused delays at trading firms, hindered some companies from publishing earnings and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements.

Organisations that host Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than in the cloud, were somewhat spared.

The outage, reports of which started climbing around 5.25pm GMT on Nov 12, according to Downdetector’s parent company Ookla, is one of the longest in Microsoft’s history and the second disruption to its services in 2026.

Microsoft said the outage specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online – its cloud-based e-mail and scheduling hub – leaving unconnected applications operational.

The incident deepens questions about the global reliance on a handful of Big Tech companies that supply both the essential software and the cloud infrastructure that underpins it.

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