From BBC News · · 1m 50s
Microsoft outage hits 430 million users globally
A major Microsoft 365 outage has disabled email, Teams and AI services worldwide, affecting schools, hospitals and governments for over 20 hours.
In brief
A major Microsoft 365 outage has disabled email, Teams and AI services worldwide, affecting schools, hospitals and governments for over 20 hours. Microsoft 365 services including email and Teams went down globally on November 13th, 2026, affecting over 430 million users and disrupting hospitals, courts and governments…
Microsoft 365 services go down
Microsoft 365 Services including Teams, Outlook and Copilot have been affected by connectivity problems. Customers cannot send or receive emails, view files or access calendar details.
Scale of the outage emerges
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps. Downdetector reported 140,000 people from 74 countries with Outlook issues on Thursday evening, though the real figure is likely much higher.
Ripple effects across the world
Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems from the outage. Courts from Los Angeles to Texas warned of delayed communications. UK GP surgeries, police and schools were affected.
Microsoft rules out cyber-attack
Microsoft attributed the outage to elevated load on its infrastructure. A large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, sending added traffic to remaining servers and straining them.
Why recovery takes so long
Prof James Ferryman from the University of Reading explained the failure snowballs. One server falls over, its work goes to the next one, and huge numbers of devices keep trying to reconnect.
“You can't just turn it all back on at once. You have to bring it back bit by bit.”
Recovery begins after 20 hours
The outage lasted more than 20 hours. On Friday afternoon Microsoft said it had seen encouraging recovery progress in Europe and improvement in North America, with email queues significantly reduced.
Experts warn of far-reaching impact
Gergely Orosz called it possibly the most disruptive business email outage of all time.Troy Hunt said Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and the outage reminds us how critical email still is.
“Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and reminds us how critical email still is.”
In short
Microsoft 365 services including email and Teams went down globally on November 13th, 2026, affecting over 430 million users and disrupting hospitals, courts and governments worldwide.