Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Millions Across Outlook, Teams, and Copilot

**DUBAI — **Millions of businesses, schools, and government agencies across the globe faced severe digital disruptions on Friday as a major Microsoft outage knocked key productivity tools offline for hours. The disruption, which began late Thursday evening and persisted into Friday, November 13, 2026, primarily crippled Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot. Users also reported intermittent access failures across OneDrive, SharePoint, and the Microsoft Store, halting workplace communications and cloud workflows across 74 countries and territories. Outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded a peak of more than 130,000 user reports in the United States for Outlook alone, alongside over 46,000 reports for the broader Microsoft 365 suite. Beyond North America, the fallout heavily impacted morning operations across the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, and Australia. According to technical updates released by Microsoft, the outage stemmed from internal infrastructure failures rather than an external cyberattack. A number of servers—particularly those supporting Exchange Online—became unexpectedly unavailable, shifting heavy loads onto remaining infrastructure. A core process responsible for establishing secure connections subsequently became overwhelmed, causing affected servers to stop handling user requests. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna confirmed there was no indication of malicious activity. Engineering teams spent the morning rolling back a recent network update that coincided with the start of the incident while testing configuration adjustments to stabilize server capacity. While some users reported gradual restoration of email and messaging services by Friday afternoon, Microsoft has yet to provide a definitive timeline for full global recovery. Enterprise administrators and individual users continue to monitor the official Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard as engineers work to clear remaining backlogs.