Microsoft struggling to fix massive cloud outage that's taken down email and Intune
A Microsoft outage on Thursday and Friday affected users of services like Outlook, Teams and 365.
Key points
- Admins trying to figure out what was wrong couldn’t access tools like Intune or the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center – they went down, too.
- Microsoft is struggling to restore many of its cloud services after a core process running on some servers became “overwhelmed” and its attempts to fix the problem failed.
- The incident started at around 18:00 UTC on November 12, and meant services including Exchange Online, Teams, Copilot 365, and Defender for Office 365 became unavailable.
Tech firm says it is ‘deeply sorry’ for disruption that took services down and has now addressed the underlying issue What caused the outage and when will it be fixed?
Microsoft has said it is “deeply sorry” for a widespread outage that caused disruption to millions of users, organisations and businesses across the globe – and that it has “addressed the underlying issue”.
Additional details
- ® UPDATED AT 00:35 UTC November 13 to add news that Microsoft says it has brought some servers back online and that they " initially remain healthy" but "can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic." So not usefully healthy at all, then.
- “Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.” The incident means email is not flowing for many Microsoft customers: friends and family of Reg writers tell us their working days are severely disrupted.
- “We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the status page advises.
- "We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior," the company advised.
- The company says a bad update—not a cyberattack or AI—caused its servers around the world to crash.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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Every article behind this summary — 4 articles from 4 outlets
CNBCNovember 14, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC →
WiredNovember 13, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC →
The Guardian WorldNovember 13, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC →
The RegisterNovember 12, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC →
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