Nearly 20 hours have passed since the start of Microsoft’s global outage, which has caused serious disruptions to email services and other applications in at least 74 countries.

Greece is among the countries reporting problems, although on a smaller scale. “We are not experiencing serious problems, in the sense that the systems are working. What isn’t working? Emails. Any ministries that have Microsoft servers are currently experiencing email problems. Outlook. There are also some problems with Copilot, Microsoft’s AI application, and Teams, but nothing significant enough to affect operations,” Digital Governance Minister Dimitris Papastergiou told SKAI television on Friday.

Microsoft is dealing with a major outage affecting its services worldwide. The disruption has been reported across 74 countries, with Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools affected. Users are facing email access issues, failed sign-ins and interrupted work. Microsoft is working on fixing the issue and bringing its services back online.

— Bitinning (@bitinning) November 13, 2026

First signs of stabilisation

At midday on Friday (13 November), Microsoft announced that its systems were showing the first signs of stabilisation, although services had not yet been fully restored.

The disruption, which began on Thursday afternoon (12 November), primarily affected Outlook and Exchange Online, while problems were also reported with Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications.

According to Microsoft’s latest update, service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels, while system performance continues to fluctuate.

The company is gradually restoring user traffic to prevent its servers from becoming overloaded again.

What happens to emails that have not been delivered?

One of the most significant problems concerns emails that have been sent but have not reached their intended recipients. Microsoft has therefore announced that it is extending the retry window for delivering delayed emails to 48 hours, in an effort to minimise the risk of messages being lost during the recovery process.

This means emails sent during the outage, including those originating from other providers such as Gmail, may still be delivered after a delay once the affected systems are restored.

The company has assured users that resolving the incident remains its highest priority, although it has not provided a specific timetable for full restoration.

We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue. To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/bVoAAh3D2G if the admin center is not available to you.

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

How many users have been affected?

The true scale of the disruption remains unknown, as reports of problems do not necessarily reflect the total number of users affected. According to the BBC, the outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded approximately 43,000 reports of Outlook problems at 9am Greek time on Friday. In the United States, reports exceeded 130,000 at the peak of the disruption.

However, these figures provide only an indication of the scale of the problem, as they account exclusively for users who actively choose to report experiencing difficulties.

Given that approximately 430 million people use Office 365 services, the actual number of those affected could be considerably higher.

Microsoft has not officially disclosed the total number of users impacted by the outage.

"This is a real red letter day." AI expert and author Andrew Grill says the global Microsoft outage will get companies thinking about ensuring they have a contingency plan in place. Read the latest 🔗 https://t.co/lwY7o1uVi3 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube https://t.co/KltzQaN1sr

— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 13, 2026

Disruption to banks, airlines and public services

The global outage has caused significant disruption to businesses, banks, airlines and public services. According to Reuters, India’s IndiGo and Akasa Air airlines experienced difficulties handling customer enquiries by email, while brokerage firms and insurance companies in Taiwan were also affected, with one company even forced to cancel a scheduled bond repurchase transaction.

In Japan, problems were reported with electronic communications at the Ministry of Finance, while financial sector executives in Australia and Singapore were forced to revert to telephone calls and fax machines to carry out and confirm transactions.

Disruptions were also reported in artificial intelligence services, with OpenAI and Anthropic experiencing problems connecting their applications to Microsoft’s services.

As previously mentioned, problems were also recorded across the banking sector, with financial institutions resorting to telephone calls and alternative communication methods to serve customers and confirm transactions.

Timeline of the outage

The outage began on Thursday afternoon (12 November), when users started experiencing problems accessing Exchange Online and Outlook. As the hours passed, the disruptions spread, with Microsoft discovering that a large number of servers had unexpectedly gone offline.

The company’s engineers attempted to resolve the problem by redistributing user traffic and restarting the affected servers. However, these efforts did not produce immediate results, as some systems began malfunctioning again as soon as the number of connections increased.

Recovery operations continued throughout the night, with the first indications of improvement emerging on Friday morning. Microsoft began gradually restoring services to avoid triggering another overload.

What caused the outage and what is Microsoft investigating?

The investigation is focusing on the cascading strain placed on the company’s infrastructure. According to Microsoft’s official updates, when a large number of servers went offline, traffic was redirected to the remaining servers, which were unable to cope with the increased demand. As a result, the initial problem spread, triggering successive disruptions across services used worldwide.

The company is also investigating whether recent changes to its systems’ technical configurations contributed to the outage. So far, the cause of the initial server failures has not been established, and there is no evidence linking the incident to a cyberattack.

Microsoft has pledged to publish a detailed technical report once the incident has been fully resolved, although it has yet to announce a specific timetable for the complete restoration of its services.