Microsoft Corporation suffered a widespread global cloud outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026.
Microsoft Corporation suffered a widespread global cloud outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026; core productivity platforms failed across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, beginning at 11:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Enterprise and consumer users could not send emails via Outlook, join meetings on Microsoft Teams, or access Word, Excel, and Copilot AI services. Downdetector tracked user-submitted incident reports in real time; reports peaked above 131,000 worldwide. Microsoft administrators tracked the incident internally under code EX1550543.
In North America, hospital administrative portals, university campus networks, and Canada's passenger rail operator Via Rail reported communication disruptions linked to the Exchange Online failure; healthcare networks in North America activated manual backup paging systems to coordinate clinical shifts. Across Singapore and Australia, thousands of office workers hit login timeouts during early Friday morning business hours. Microsoft updated customers via its official service status channel and stated that a portion of service infrastructure experienced unexpected degradation, and engineering teams were rerouting network traffic to alternate healthy systems to restore access.
Microsoft had not immediately published a formal technical root-cause analysis during the peak of the outage. By late Thursday evening Eastern Time, Microsoft confirmed service telemetry was recovering across major regions; rerouted traffic stabilized Outlook and Teams functionality, and IT administrators cautioned about queued email backlogs that could experience delivery delays over several hours. University administrators postponed online examinations and administrative approvals until mail servers stabilized; the University of Pennsylvania was among institutional IT desks that mirrored incident logs. Microsoft's cloud reliability engineers issued rolling advisories through the Microsoft 365 admin center under code EX1550543, isolated the degraded server cluster, and redirected user authentication traffic toward healthy regional data centers.
