Last updated: Friday November 13, 2026 08:53 GMT
A widespread outage involving Microsoft’s Outlook email and other applications remains ongoing, with the company saying it is working to restore service.
A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms including Outlook on Thursday, with many users experiencing difficulties using their email accounts and other errors in the tech giant’s suite of applications.
Microsoft said Thursday evening that it had noticed “that a process on the affected servers, responsible for establishing secure connections, is overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests.”
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Here’s how the news is developing.
Which Microsoft 365 services are down?
Microsoft said services that could be affected by the outage include:
- Online exchange
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Copilot 365
- Microsoft Defender XDR
- Microsoft Planner
- Microsoft to do
- Microsoft Intune
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365
1 hour and 16 minutes ago
Microsoft Outlook outage spreads
A widespread outage involving Microsoft’s Outlook email and other applications remains ongoing, with the company saying it is working to restore service.
In an update at 11:44 p.m. PST, Microsoft 365 said it was “seeing positive results in service stability and increased capacity from our latest traffic optimization actions.”
Microsoft reports ‘partial recovery in all regions’ as Outlook outage continues
In an update Thursday evening, Microsoft said it was continuing its efforts to improve server stability to improve traffic flow as it worked to repair an hours-long outage affecting its products for millions of people around the world.
Outlook is one of several Microsoft products that has been unavailable to users for most of the day.
In an update posted at 8:36 p.m. PST, Microsoft 365 said it was seeing partial recovery access in regions where it deployed changes, but recovery was not supported. She said she continued to examine what additional steps could be taken to improve overall stability.
In another update at 9:01 p.m. PST, Microsoft 365 said: “We are engaged in multiple workstreams to mitigate the impact, resolve our current blocker, and return portions of the service infrastructure to a healthy state. »
Microsoft sees ‘positive results’ in efforts to restart servers
As of 6 p.m. PST on Thursday, Microsoft said it had seen “positive results” in its efforts to restart affected servers, causing a major outage.
Full status update:
We are seeing positive results from our efforts to restart affected infrastructure. We actively monitor their performance to verify stability which will enable better availability. Corrective actions will be expanded as we confirm stability with the applied changes.
Microsoft reveals cause of massive service outage
Microsoft has revealed the cause of the massive outage of its 365 services that has inconvenienced users around the world.
In a situation update Thursday evening, Microsoft said its investigation found “that a process on the affected servers, responsible for establishing secure connections, is overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests.”
Microsoft is still actively working to resolve the issue and is expected to provide an update at 6 p.m. PST.
Full status update:
“Our investigation revealed that a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections is saturated, causing requests to stop processing. We are preparing a configuration change to address this behavior that can be applied across all affected servers, and we are validating it on a subset of servers before applying it more broadly to reboots of the affected infrastructure. In parallel, we have begun rolling back a recent network configuration change that correlates with the start of the impact and we are monitoring To determine if this helps recovery. The limitations we described previously are now in effect in specific locations. We are monitoring affected servers in those locations to confirm whether they remain stable while handling a smaller set of connections, after which we will gradually reintroduce additional traffic.
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