Microsoft says services restored across affected environments after massive outage

Microsoft on Saturday said services had fully recovered across Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other applications, ending a global outage that crippled online communications across businesses and governments for over 24 hours, Reuters reported.

Microsoft Teams logo and words "Global Outage" in this illustration taken on November 13, 2026. (REUTERS)Microsoft saw a massive global outage on Thursday, with services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot disrupted. As efforts continue to restore the services, businesses relying on Microsoft have also been impacted.

Amid the outage, Downdetector tracked a peak of about 200,000 reports of user issues across Microsoft services shortly after 1pm New York time, though the number of new reports has since declined for products including Outlook and Copilot.

That, however, did not mean service was restored. Microsoft on Friday said the widespread outage which disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services was triggered by a technical snag, which occurred during an earlier network capacity upgrade, and surfaced following a recent network change.

It said that the particular issue had been addressed, and that a broad recovery of services was underway. “This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.

We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions,” the company said in a post on X. Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage.

While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration." The outage affected email access, calendar functions and workplace communication, with several businesses and government agencies reporting operational problems.

The company apologised to its customers and partners for the disruptions, while asserting that it takes the “responsibility” for its services “extremely seriously.” Microsoft said that it would provide a full post-incident report once its review is completed.

The outage also affected other businesses that rely on Microsoft services, including OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with its Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections could fail and some tools might not work as expected.

However, on Friday, OpenAI said the errors affecting its Microsoft 365 connector had been resolved. Anthropic also reported an issue with an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. Follow the latest breaking news, major developments and agenda-setting stories from India and around the world with the newsdesk at Hindustan Times.

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