{
  "id": 19707787,
  "title": "Global Microsoft outage affecting Outlook and Teams users, with company ‘restarting’ servers",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/12/global-microsoft-outage-affecting-outlook-and-teams-users-with-19707787",
  "topic": "world",
  "section": "World",
  "published": "2026-11-12T21:14:11.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Guardian Australia",
    "slug": "the-guardian-australia",
    "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/nov/13/microsoft-outage-outlook-teams-word-excel-reports"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "A global Microsoft outage has affected users of Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, and the AI assistant Copilot. The company announced it was \"aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact\" and explained that servers experienced \"elevated load\" which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors. Microsoft said it determined \"a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable\" due to a problem causing them to fail during automated checks. The outage began around 3pm UTC on Thursday and as of 9pm UTC, Microsoft had validated an alternative health check method on a subset of servers, allowing them to return to service. The company was also preparing an automated process to detect and restart unresponsive servers. Microsoft paused all deployments and configuration changes while they reviewed recent changes for any correlation to the event.",
  "summary": "A global outage has impacted Microsoft 365 users, with nearly 130,000 reports of issues affecting software including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The disruption also extended to enterprise services such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and the AI assistant Copilot, according to The Guardian and The Guardian Australia. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald report that Microsoft is turning servers off and on again to resolve the issues affecting tens of thousands of users worldwide.\n\nABC News (US) reports that Microsoft identified issues with Microsoft Teams functionality in North America and Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas. While the company initially suggested elevated load might be the cause, it later clarified that the load was not driven by increased traffic, but by several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable and straining the remaining infrastructure. Microsoft indicated that failed health checks may originate from a specific component responsible for processing server health.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 6,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Channel News Asia",
        "title": "Microsoft 365, Outlook down for thousands of US users, Downdetector shows",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/12/microsoft-365-outlook-down-for-thousands-of-us-users-downdetector",
        "published": "2026-11-12T18:32:48.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "The National UAE",
        "title": "Outlook email outage affects users around the world",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/12/outlook-email-outage-affects-users-around-the-world",
        "published": "2026-11-12T18:34:11.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "Gulf News",
        "title": "Microsoft 365, Outlook hit by major outage; global impact possible",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/12/microsoft-365-outlook-hit-by-major-outage-global-impact-possible",
        "published": "2026-11-12T19:03:22.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "CityNews",
        "title": "Widespread outage hits Outlook, other Microsoft apps",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/12/widespread-outage-hits-outlook-other-microsoft-apps",
        "published": "2026-11-12T19:21:01.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "ABC News (US)",
        "title": "Outlook outage: Microsoft reports 'issues' with Teams and email",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/12/outlook-outage-microsoft-reports-issues-with-teams-and-email",
        "published": "2026-11-12T21:00:57.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}