The first signs of improvement are being recorded by Microsoft on Friday morning (13 November), as efforts continue to resolve the widespread technical failure that has affected users in at least 74 countries worldwide.

Despite technical interventions, the problems have not been fully resolved, while the company has not announced a specific timetable for the complete restoration of its services.

Microsoft’s outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector. Microsoft says its Exchange Online incident began at 16:17 UTC. Reports to Downdetector about Outlook began climbing at about 17:25 UTC, 12:25 in New York. By 18:25, reports about five Microsoft services combined reached 19,650 a minute, against <15 a minute on an average Thursday. Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level. Reports did not stay in the Americas. They jumped tenfold in the UK at 17:43, in India at 23:21 local time and in New Zealand at 06:55 local time. Between 17:00 and 18:55 UTC, nearly 3 in 10 reports came from outside the US. We count a country here once its reports reach ten times normal and at least 20 in five minutes. Reports about Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold, and Azure about a hundredfold. Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn, also Microsoft’s, rose far less. Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions. At 19:38 UTC, reports were still running at more than 11,000 a minute.

— Downdetector (@downdetector) November 12, 2026

In its latest update via its official account on X, Microsoft said it was seeing “positive results” from efforts to restart the affected infrastructure and restore server availability. Technical teams are monitoring the systems as they gradually come back online to determine whether they can remain stable.

However, restoration remains difficult, as servers that have resumed operation have experienced further problems as soon as they are subjected to normal user traffic. The company is attempting to increase available computing capacity, redistribute network traffic and implement alternative configurations.

In another attempt to address the disruption, Microsoft is testing a rollback to a previous version of the software configuration on some of the affected servers. At the same time, it is temporarily restricting certain types of network traffic to establish whether a particular category of requests is causing the overload. If the tests prove successful, the measures will be extended to other servers.

We’re engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact, address our current blocker, and returning portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/pYdahqxDv3 if the admin center is not available to you.

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

What caused the global outage?

As for the causes of the worldwide outage, Microsoft has identified an overload in a server process responsible for managing users’ secure connections. When traffic increases, the systems are unable to cope, resulting in interrupted access to services such as Outlook.

The company is also investigating whether a recent change to network settings contributed to the problem, although it has yet to establish the definitive cause.

It should be noted that, so far, there is no evidence of a cyberattack.

Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organizations caught up in a widespread outage of Microsoft programs, with the government triggering an agreement with the company to ensure priority restoration of services https://t.co/gwdHq2bLQ4 https://t.co/N542Jsjp0U

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 13, 2026

Airlines and artificial intelligence services affected

According to the latest information from Reuters, Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported problems with their email-based customer services, while stockbroking firms, insurance companies and investment organisations in Taiwan were also affected.

One company was even forced to cancel a scheduled bond buyback transaction because of the disruption.

Artificial intelligence services were also affected, with OpenAI and Anthropic reporting problems with their applications’ connections to Microsoft services.

Which services are affected?

The most serious problems have been reported with Exchange Online and Outlook, with users experiencing difficulties sending and receiving emails.

Disruptions have also been reported across Microsoft 365 services, including OneDrive, SharePoint and Copilot, while Teams has primarily experienced problems with individual features that depend on Exchange.

The outage began on Thursday (12 November), with Downdetector recording nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems at the height of the disruption. Within approximately one hour, service failures had been reported across 74 countries and territories. Deutsche Welle+1

BREAKING: 🚨 Microsoft CONFIRMS latest fixes have failed. "We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re NOT TAKING as expected." https://t.co/hQ5JBhnHXe

— TRENDING ➞ 911 (@911NewsBreaks) November 13, 2026

Despite the initial positive results, Microsoft continues to monitor the stability of its infrastructure and implement additional technical measures, as the complete restoration of services remains pending.

The company has warned that services may be restored gradually as available capacity is recovered and users’ applications reconnect to servers. Consequently, improvements observed in certain regions do not necessarily mean that the outage has been resolved worldwide.