what is the microsoft issue today
Rayan Khaled
Microsoft is recovering from a widespread service outage that began around midday ET on Thursday, November 12, 2026, impacting tens of thousands of users across Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, and Copilot. The disruption was caused by multiple servers failing automated health checks and dropping offline, which strained the remaining infrastructure and triggered connectivity errors worldwide.
What Happened
- Root Cause. A specific server component caused multiple servers to fail automated health checks and become unexpectedly unavailable. This sudden loss of capacity overwhelmed the remaining servers under normal traffic loads.
- Scope of Impact. Outage reports on Downdetector spiked to nearly 130,000 for Outlook alone around 1:00 p.m. ET, with nearly 300,000 total reports logged across Microsoft 365 services. While initially concentrated in North America, Microsoft confirmed that connectivity issues could affect users in any region.
Affected Services
Users reported delayed emails, login failures, and timeouts across several core enterprise and consumer tools:
- Email & Messaging. Outlook, Exchange Online mailboxes, and Microsoft Teams.
- Productivity & AI. Microsoft 365 web apps, SharePoint Online, Microsoft To Do, and Copilot 365.
- Security & Admin. Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Purview, and admin portals.
Current Status and Recovery
- Mitigation Efforts. Engineers paused new deployments, redistributed connection traffic across healthy global infrastructure, and restarted affected servers.
- Service Restoration. By late afternoon ET on November 12, Microsoft validated an alternative service health check method and began bringing subsets of servers back online. Outage reports dropped significantly from their midday peaks, though Microsoft continues deploying automated recovery systems to stabilize remaining affected servers.
- Live Updates. Admins and users can track ongoing remediation under incident codes EX1550543 and MO1550821 on the Microsoft Service Health Status page or via the Microsoft 365 Status account on X.