Before Outlook: 10 ways offices communicated before email

The Outlook email service experienced a significant outage on November 12, 2026, impacting users across the globe. Microsoft's status page confirmed the issue, stating that users were unable to connect to their mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. The company was investigating the source of the errors and collecting networking logs to determine the next steps.

Downdetector reported that users worldwide were experiencing problems with not only Outlook but also Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and Teams. Microsoft classified the issue as a service degradation and began redistributing connection traffic across its broader worldwide infrastructure to balance the load. However, the problem persisted for several hours, affecting many users.

Government agencies and businesses worldwide were also impacted, leading to delays in email responses. Microsoft acknowledged that the issue was not caused by an increase in traffic but rather by several servers being unexpectedly unavailable. Despite efforts to restore service, including re-isolating a portion of infrastructure and restarting certain components, Microsoft reported that the issue remained unresolved.

The company indicated that certain servers might become unresponsive once traffic started moving through them. Microsoft continued to analyze diagnostic data to understand what was triggering the behavior and temporarily limited certain types of traffic to the affected infrastructure in some locations. This situation remains under development.