Microsoft has begun bringing Outlook, Teams and Copilot back after an outage that started on Thursday evening and hit dozens of countries. On Friday, 13 November 2026, the company wrote on X: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI.” ABC noted that full service was still being restored.

In the statement carried by ABC, Microsoft said the incident came from a problem during an earlier network-capacity upgrade and showed up after a later network change. The underlying fault has been fixed, but service is still being restored for the remaining customers and regions. Seznam Zprávy, citing The Guardian, also mentioned a possible trail in the configuration of the servers that run Microsoft 365. The company spoke of “elevated load”: some servers became unavailable without warning and strained the ones left standing. The full cause is due in a final report, once the incident is closed.

Seznam says that at 8:00 Downdetector had at least 43,000 Outlook reports from 72 countries. The BBC, quoted there, says the real number is higher, because the count includes only people who filed a report. ABC speaks of 74 countries and territories, across the Americas and parts of Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa. Seznam puts the services’ users worldwide at about 430 million. So delayed messages would not be lost, Microsoft extended the email delivery window to 48 hours.

In the Czech Republic the finance, transport and education ministries were hit: email was down, but ordinary work mostly went on. At Prague’s Václav Havel Airport, spokeswoman Denisa Hejtmánková said the outage mainly affected communication and work tools and the intranet, not flight operations or the crisis systems. Microsoft’s Czech spokeswoman, Karolína Kříženecká, said after 16:00 that recovery was continuing and that mail was being delivered better across more of the affected systems.

In Britain, Rachel Harrison of the GMB union said NHS staff taking emergency calls could not pass on patient details in the usual way, and a large backlog built up. In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air warned that support email might not be receiving customers’ messages. Immigration New Zealand stopped processing visas. In Japan, economy minister Ryosei Akazawa spoke of a “significant impact,” because Microsoft products are used by a very large number of people.

In the City of London, auditor Yashmit Sharma told AFP, as quoted by ABC, that the biggest problem was Copilot, the AI assistant, along with Outlook. Sheera, a risk manager at a bank, said firms need to be better prepared: “You wake up and Outlook is not working, and it’s the main communication we use for our global team.”

David Strejc of Apertia Tech told Seznam that the failure of one component can set off a chain. For many firms, email carries orders, invoices and complaints; if documents, internal chat and accounting sit with the same provider, almost the whole operation can stop. A spokesman for the German digital ministry expects a marked impact on companies there. Troy Hunt told the BBC that the episode shows how much work, appointments and shopping still hang on email.

Image: Wikimedia Commons — Building 92 on Microsoft’s Redmond campus (Jiaqian AirplaneFan, CC BY 3.0). The photo is not from the November 2026 outage.

Sources consulted: The Microsoft outage: what is behind it and when it ends — Seznam Zprávy; Microsoft says sorry and reports a broad recovery — ABC News.