A major global disruption to Microsoft’s services has caused problems.
Also, in some cases, it has left entire services inoperable, including email and artificial intelligence services.
Reports of problems with the email service Outlook reached a global peak of nearly 140,000 reports at around 18:00 on Thursday, according to the monitoring website Downdetector.
Also, here is Microsoft’s website showing the real-time status of its services.
Microsoft has said that the disruption was not due to a cybersecurity incident. We don’t know exactly caused it. Also, efforts to fix the issue have so far been unsuccessful.
This is what we know about the affected services and what has gone wrong.
Microsoft struggles to restore services after a global outage hit companies and governments, leaving users without access to tools including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot. https://t.co/K0E1DEQn5g
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 13, 2026
What services have been affected?
Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Outlook and Copilot (Microsoft’s artificial intelligence software), have been affected by “connectivity issues”.
Although customers are reporting different levels of access, many have not been able to send or receive emails, or view certain files or details in their calendar apps.
That said, some users have been able to use Teams normally and are using the messaging and online meeting features as usual.
How many people have been affected?
The full scale of the service disruption has not yet been confirmed, but the monitoring website Downdetector recorded 140,000 people from 74 different countries on Thursday afternoon reporting problems with Outlook.
According to Microsoft’s website, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps. And the tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have reported problems as a result of the service disruption.
OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft’s services, which has caused some tools not to work as expected.
Government bodies and services, including the Government of Singapore and the Australian intelligence agency, have also said they have been affected.
The Microsoft outage continues hours later, with Outlook and Teams still being down for many users globally.
(https://t.co/VnABRBgwhj) pic.twitter.com/kwLRqvyjIa
— Pop Base (@PopBase) November 13, 2026
What has gone wrong?
Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack and has attributed the ongoing disruption to a “high load” on its infrastructure. The term refers to when servers handle a much greater amount of traffic than usual.
In the case of the Microsoft disruption, a large number of servers were “unexpectedly taken out of service,” according to the company, which diverted additional traffic to the remaining servers, overloading them.
Earlier today, Microsoft said it had seen “marginal success” in its efforts to resolve the incident.
The company said in its latest update that it continues to monitor activity across all regions to assess the state of the servers and determine what measures it can take to improve capacity. In other words, there’s still no fix and none is expected any time soon.
