Microsoft Says Services Are Recovering After Global Outage

Microsoft said on Friday, November 13, 2026, that it was seeing widespread improvements to its services, a day after a global outage took them offline.

The disruption began around noon Eastern time on Thursday and spread to more than 70 countries and territories, according to The New York Times. Microsoft's Outlook, Teams and Copilot stopped working during the outage. Microsoft's public cloud status page reported service degradation affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as its consumer products, and said users might be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.

In its update on Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure." The company did not say when all services would be fully restored.

Microsoft described the outage as a technical issue. It said it was not related to cyber activity or to A.I. agents, and that there was no indication it resulted from malicious activity. The New York Times reported these statements.

The company also explained why it posted status information on its public page. Administrators may be unable to reach the admin center, the internal console where they normally check service health, so updates were published where anyone could see them.

Microsoft has promised to publish a full report identifying the root cause of the outage.