Microsoft sees improvements in global outage

Microsoft said it is seeing improvements in a global outage, but that it hasn’t been fully resolved.

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The company said it is making progress and “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads,” The Associated Press reported.

The company said that “email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 356 infrastructure,” but users may still see intermittent issues.

We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. We’re focused on…

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

Microsoft is still trying to determine the cause of the outage as it gets servers back online. It is using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”

The tech giant said there was no indication that the issues were caused by malicious activity, the AP reported. CNN reported that the company said the issues were not caused by a cybersecurity breach.

At its height, outages hit 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector.

The outage affected services such as Outlook, Copilot, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint among others, CNN reported.

On Friday, the company said the core functions of Teams and Copilot were working, The New York Times reported.

Schools and agencies were telling people to call instead of email if they needed to reach someone.

Several police agencies in the UK alerted people that their online form submissions were down and that people should call if they have an issue.

Due to a global Microsoft service issue, some online form submissions on our website (https://t.co/RkCUuAugcw) may be affected.

If your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please call 101.

In an emergency, call 999. pic.twitter.com/oyku8Z0sBD

— Herts Police 🌹 (@HertsPolice) November 13, 2026

Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado said jail officials couldn’t receive emails to process bond payments for those being held in the facility, while a hospital in Toronto could not get or send email, so it told patients to call for appointments.

Other tech companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, also had issues connecting to Microsoft, the newspaper said.

“It shows how reliant we are on these cloud systems,” computer science professor Dr. Timothy Wood told the Times.