Microsoft Outage LIVE: Microsoft outage enters second day; company says not aware of malicious activity

A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, on Thursday (November 12, 2026), with many users encountering trouble using their email accounts and other errors across the tech giant’s suite of apps. Also read | Job cuts, retirement plan, voluntary exits: What’s going on at Microsoft?

Nearly 1,30,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook just after 1 pm local time. New reports have since fallen from that peak, but many said they couldn’t send and receive emails or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether.

Thousands also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and wider Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft said it was investigating disruptions, notably related to its email and Teams applications.

The story so far: Software giant Microsoft is facing a widespread outage affecting users of its Outlook email service, as well as its other workplace products. Thousands of Microsoft users in India awakened on Friday (November 13, 2026) to find their inboxes inaccessible, losing hours of productivity.

According to DownDetector, over 100,000 users had initially registered complaints about Microsoft Outlook.​Microsoft Outage: Why did Microsoft Outlook and other products go offline globally?Microsoft shared on X on November 13 that a portion of infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, and this could likely be contributing to the connectivity errors.

Microsoft’s workplace services, including Outlook and Teams, remained disrupted for users in India and elsewhere on Friday (November 13, 2026), a day after a global outage began, with the company saying it was still working to pinpoint the cause and is not aware of any malicious activity behind it.

Microsoft’s service health page showed “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as its consumer products, as of an update at 11.16 am India time on Friday (November 13, 2026). The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the underlying cause of a traffic influx and to recover its backend servers.

“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident,” it said, adding that full details of the root cause would be shared in a post-incident report once the issue is mitigated. Microsoft said Thursday (November 13, 2026) that it was not aware of any “malicious activity” behind the hours-long disruption of its Outlook services.

“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution,” Microsoft said. “For a city whose economy runs on serving global clients, [the outage] is no minor inconvenience,” Sambratha Shetty, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Synergia Foundation, said.

“Bengaluru’s IT firms, startups and global capability centres coordinate across time zones through email, Teams calls and shared files. When those stop, client deliveries slip, support queues pile up, and teams sit idle.

For outsourcing contracts bound by strict service-level agreements, even a few hours of downtime can mean penalties and strained client trust.” “Bengaluru’s tech leaders should treat cloud failure as certain, not hypothetical.

That means backup communication channels, multi-vendor setups and regularly tested continuity plans. The city that builds resilient systems for the world must build them for itself,” the COO said. Downdetector said that Microsoft’s outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour, in a post on X.

“Reports about Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold, and Azure about a hundredfold. Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn, also Microsoft’s, rose far less,” the post said. “We are closely monitoring the ongoing Microsoft outage,” Air India posted on X.

“Our flight operations remain unaffected.” Cartier-owner Richemont’s first half results ⁠announcement, due ‌at ‌0600GMT, ‌has been ⁠delayed ⁠due to the global ‌disruption of Microsoft services, the ‌luxury company said ⁠on Friday.