If you’re having trouble accessing Outlook, sending an email, or accessing some Microsoft 365 tools, the problem likely isn’t with your Internet connection. Since Thursday 12 November 2026, a serious interruption has been affecting several services of the Redmond giant, making it very difficult to continue their work for thousands of people who, all over the world, rely on Microsoft services to complete their activities. The platforms affected by the global downtime of Microsoft services include Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Copilot, the company’s AI-based assistant. Those affected by the situation would be 74 countries that have seen these services haywire for at least 12 hours. The problem, initially limited to some geographical areas, has progressively spread to an international level and, on the morning of Friday 13 November, the situation is still not resolved.
Outlook, Teams and Copilot in haywire 74 countries: which services don’t work
To get an idea of how big the disservice is, just look at the volume of reports collected by platforms of the caliber of Downdetector. This site, which allows users to report problems with websites and online services of various kinds, had collected something like 130-140 thousand reports relating to Outlook from 74 countries around 7pm on Thursday evening. In the United States alone, over 25,000 of these problems have been recorded; More than 3,000 reports relating to the outage were sent from Italy.
For many users the problem manifests itself with the inability to access their email inbox. In fact, when trying to open Outlook from the browser, the error message “Something went wrong“, that is to say “Something went wrong». Others, however, manage to log in, but only view the emails received several hours ago, without being able to retrieve the most recent ones and, obviously, without being able to send new messages. Teams, the corporate communications and video conferencing tool, and Copilot also reported malfunctions, although with different consequences depending on the users and the features used. In some cases, in fact, Teams continued to work normally, allowing you to join meetings and use its instant messaging functions.
Why Microsoft 365 is down all over the world: the server problem
To understand what is happening we need to look at the infrastructure that allows these services to function. Microsoft identified the problem in Exchange Online, the cloud platform that manages users’ email, calendars, contacts and activities. In fact, in a note he explained that «the functionality of Microsoft 365 services (…) that interact with Exchange Online and email services are affected (by the down). Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional».
According to initial communications from the company, some servers distributed across multiple regions suddenly became unavailable. This caused a knock-on effect: traffic normally handled by those servers was directed to those still functioning, subjecting them to a load beyond their capacity. And you understand well that when the workload that a server has to manage becomes excessive, slowdowns, connection errors and, in the most serious cases, the inability to use a service due to a downtime can occur. Microsoft explained that it has restarted the failed servers and is monitoring the situation.
The operations, however, are not yet leading to a complete resolution of the problem. Microsoft has admitted that the changes introduced to improve the functioning of the infrastructure are not producing the desired results. In fact, some systems remain stuck in an error state and are unable to synchronize updates correctly. At the moment, Microsoft reports a partial restoration of some services, but has not specified which ones are working again.
No hacker attack: comparison with the CrowdStrike case
Given the not exactly peaceful period we are experiencing due to the increasingly pressing threat of hybrid warfare, one of the first hypotheses raised by the media regarding the origin of the problem took into consideration the possibility that a cyber attack could be behind the downturn. At the moment it seems that Microsoft has ruled out this hypothesis, specifying that there are no indications of malicious activity.
Charles Lamanna, the company’s executive vice president for Copilot, also reiterated: «For the moment I can confirm that there is no indication that this is the result of malicious or cyber activity». The Australian Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke, added: «(At Microsoft) they believe they’re dealing somewhat similarly to what we saw with CrowdStrike, where there’s an update that went wrong». It should be noted, however, that CrowdStrike’s comparison is simply a comparison and not a confirmation of the technical causes of the current accident.
