Microsoft reported progress in restoring its services early Friday, saying its latest traffic optimization measures are improving stability and adding capacity more than 12 hours after users began reporting access problems.

Microsoft 365 said on X that it is extending the measures across the affected countries to bring its services and apps back consistently.

We’re seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions. We're implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/pYdahqxDv3 if the admin center is not available to you.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026

The disruption took down servers behind Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services, and reached 74 countries and territories within an hour on Thursday, according to the outage tracker Downdetector. Senior Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said malicious or cyber activity was not behind the failure.

How the outage unfolded

Microsoft first told users around 17:50 GMT Thursday that it was investigating reports of trouble reaching Exchange Online, its cloud email service. At about 19:50 GMT, it said it was testing a configuration change to its cloud servers, and by 21:40 GMT it was restarting affected servers to return them to service.

The company then said a core process on the affected servers was becoming overwhelmed and causing a loss of capacity, so it was shifting traffic to relieve the servers still running. Servers brought back online could stop responding again once traffic reached them, it added, and engineers were analyzing diagnostic data to find the trigger.

At 04:36 GMT Friday, Microsoft reported partial recovery in regions where it had applied adjustments, though not yet sustained recovery.

Around 07:30 GMT, it said server stability was improving after a patch to an upstream authentication and routing configuration component was applied to part of its infrastructure.

The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the incident and would keep working with urgency, promising a Post-Incident Report on the root cause and repair measures once the problem is contained.

Services, users affected

The failures reached both business and consumer products. By 04:00 GMT Friday, Microsoft’s status pages listed Exchange Online, Copilot, Planner, SharePoint, To Do, Windows 365, cloud printing and mobile device management among the corporate services with problems.

A notice on the company’s website said Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web were also hit.

Email traffic stalled for many of Microsoft’s 450 million users, with programs freezing and crashing and phones unable to refresh inboxes or send messages. Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, stayed online.

Disruption for businesses, government

Truck maker Workhorse Group postponed its Thursday earnings release, blaming business disruption from the outage. Communications were hit at California agencies, including the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office and Sheriff’s Department, according to NBC Los Angeles, while email services at federal agencies and on Capitol Hill were also affected.

In Colorado, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office said online bond payments for detainees were down, so anyone seeking release on bond had to pay in person at the jail until Outlook returned.

Outages on this scale have grown rarer. In 2024, a glitch in a security program froze Windows devices worldwide with the “blue screen of death” error, halting airlines, companies, and critical systems.