Microsoft said on Friday, 13 November 2026, that Outlook email delivery was returning to normal after a global outage disrupted services used by millions of people.
The company apologised for the disruption and said it had addressed the underlying technical issue. The outage began on Thursday evening GMT and affected Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant.
Some users struggled to access their email or join online meetings. Outage tracker Downdetector received reports from 74 countries and territories within about an hour. Microsoft said the problem began after a network change intended to increase capacity. The company ruled out a cyberattack.
By Friday, it said the backlog of emails waiting to be delivered had fallen sharply, although some users could still face delays or difficulty accessing services during the recovery. The disruption affected businesses, government offices, hospitals and courts.
European stock exchange operator Euronext said it was unable to receive emails during the outage and advised listed companies to contact it by phone. Salone Messenger
