Outlook is down worldwide. Microsoft’s 365 services failed on Thursday, knocking out email, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant for more than five hours. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 at about 1:30 in the morning in India, and users in 74 countries were hit.
Updated: 13 November 2026, 10:30 IST
Quick Read
- Outlook, Teams, Copilot, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive went down in a global Microsoft 365 outage on Thursday 12 November, lasting more than five hours into Friday in India.
- Reports of Outlook problems on Downdetector peaked at 138,058 at about 1:30 AM IST on Friday, then fell to about 34,490 by Thursday evening in the US. The outage hit 74 countries and territories.
- Microsoft says its servers failed automated health checks, which piled extra load onto the servers that were left. It was not a traffic surge, and Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyber attack. No root cause has been confirmed yet.
What went down
The outage hit the tools most offices run on. Outlook email stopped working for thousands of users. Teams calls and chats failed. Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, went down too. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive were all hit, the reports say.
The damage spread further than Microsoft’s own apps. Connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI companies, also broke. That meant some AI tools that plug into Microsoft 365 stopped working as well.
Google Trends India showed “Outlook” as one of the day’s top searches, with 200,000-plus searches, up 600%.
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How big was it
Downdetector, the site that tracks outages from user reports, showed the scale. Outlook problem reports peaked at 138,058 at about 1:30 AM IST on Friday — 1 PM on Thursday in New York. By Thursday evening in the US, the number had fallen to about 34,490.
By 5:47 PM in the US, Microsoft 365 reports had fallen to about 13,000 and Teams to 763. The outage touched 74 countries and territories — not a problem in one place.
The outage lasted more than five hours. That is a long time for tools that offices use all day.
What Microsoft says broke
Microsoft’s own account is simple. A number of its servers became “unexpectedly unavailable” after failing automated health checks. The work those servers carried piled onto the servers that were left, and the extra load caused the failures users saw.
Two things Microsoft ruled out. The extra load was not caused by a surge in traffic. And Microsoft said there is no sign of a cyber attack.
The company paused all deployments and configuration changes, and started restarting servers and shifting traffic to healthy ones. Recovery was gradual. Microsoft said it saw only limited recovery by 6 PM on Thursday in the US, though Teams was fixed in North America.
No root cause has been confirmed yet. Microsoft is tracking the incident under two codes, EX1550543 and MO1550821.
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If your Outlook still fails
First, wait. This is a server-side failure, so nothing on your phone or laptop caused it, and restarting your device will not fix it. Do not reset your password in a panic — a password change will not bring a dead server back, and it can lock you out of other apps.
Second, check Microsoft’s service health page or your admin centre, under incident codes EX1550543 and MO1550821, for the latest status. If you use Outlook at work, your IT team will see the same codes.
Third, keep a backup way to reach people. If a mail is urgent, use a phone call, a message app, or a personal email account until Outlook is back.
No India user numbers have been published, so we cannot say how many Indian users were hit. The 200,000-plus searches for “Outlook” in India show plenty of people here noticed.
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FAQ
Was this a cyber attack?
Microsoft says there is no sign of one. Its account is that servers failed automated health checks and the extra load broke the service. No root cause has been confirmed yet, so the full reason is still unknown.
How long did the outage last?
More than five hours. Outlook reports peaked at about 1:30 AM IST on Friday and had fallen sharply by Thursday evening in the US, but Microsoft said recovery was gradual and only limited by 6 PM in the US.
Is Outlook back now?
Microsoft said recovery was gradual, with only limited recovery by 6 PM on Thursday in the US, and Teams fixed in North America. Check the service health page under EX1550543 or MO1550821 for the latest status before you rely on it.
Desk-original added context
Our own Downdetector timeline, from the reports: about 1:30 AM IST Friday — Outlook reports peak at 138,058; Thursday evening in the US — Outlook reports down to about 34,490; 5:47 PM in the US — Microsoft 365 reports at about 13,000, Teams at 763; 6 PM in the US — Microsoft reports only limited recovery so far. Our own maths: 138,058 down to 34,490 is a fall of about three-quarters — but a quarter of the peak is still a lot of people with broken email. And one gap worth stating: no India user numbers have been published anywhere we read, even though “Outlook” was one of India’s top searches of the day. The scale here is clear; the scale in India is not.
Sources
- ET CIO (Reuters) — Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and AI services for over five hours (13 Nov 2026, 200 verified; primary source)
- BusinessWorld — Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for thousands (13 Nov 2026, 200 verified)
- Business Today — Microsoft 365 disruption hits 74 countries; Outlook, Teams and Copilot knocked offline (13 Nov 2026, 200 verified)
Sasanka Sekhar Pradhan is the founder of India Presents, an India-focused news site. He covers daily box-office trackers, India news, economy explainers, sports previews and festival guides — in simple English, so readers across India can follow fast-moving stories without jargon. His focus is what a story means for the reader: the number that matters, the source behind it, and what happens next. India Presents publishes daily, with day-trackers updated as new figures come in.
