The key facts
- The Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 outage affected more than 70 countries; Downdetector received over 130,000 complaints from US users within an hour
- The Japanese government network, Australian federal police systems, NHS email in Britain, and the services of IndiGo, Akasa Air, Air India and CemAir airlines were left without communication
- This is Microsoft's second global outage in 2026 after the January one; the company's shares fell by about 3%
What happened
On the evening of November 12, 2026, Microsoft users faced a large-scale failure: the Exchange Online cloud email service and the Microsoft 365 services that depend on it stopped working. Users could not use Outlook email, the Teams corporate platform, or the Copilot AI assistant. According to the corporation, the outage affected more than 70 countries. Twelve hours after the first reports, Microsoft had still not fully restored its services.
How the outage spread around the world
Residents of North and South America were the first to encounter the problems. During rush hour, the Downdetector monitoring service received more than 130,000 complaints from American users about Outlook malfunctions. Artificial intelligence developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, were also affected.
Critical infrastructure and business
Within a few hours, the outage spread to other continents. In Australia, communication failures with Microsoft services occurred in the systems of the federal police and counterintelligence. The British National Health Service reported email problems and warned that some patients might not receive their medication prescriptions on time.
Critical infrastructure and business
In Japan, where the outage struck in the middle of the working day, the government communications network uniting ministries and agencies stopped working: officials had to return to paper document flow, and counterparties of European exchanges had to communicate by phone. IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India in India and CemAir in South Africa warned about non-functioning customer service systems linked to email; railway companies in Canada, Germany and Britain reported the same.
Microsoft's response and open questions
Microsoft initially reported that automatic recovery mechanisms were working and the outage would soon be fixed, but then admitted that the measures taken had not produced the expected result. In its latest post on X on the morning of November 13, the corporation's press service stated that 'positive changes are being observed, however some issues may persist.' The cause of the outage is still unknown: Microsoft emphasized that it sees no signs that it was caused by a hacker attack.
Scale and consequences
This is already the second global outage of Microsoft services in 2026: in January, Microsoft 365 went down. Ahead of the opening of the main trading session, the corporation's shares fell by about 3%. The incident showed how wide the circle of critically important organizations — from government agencies and healthcare services to airlines and railways — that depend on a single cloud email service is.
