Microsoft 365 outage 2026-11-12
Microsoft has had a widespread outage since about 9:45 a.m. Pacific today. Email took the worst of it. Teams, SharePoint, and Copilot are affected too, though features that do not depend on email may still work. Microsoft 365 serves more than 450 million paid business users at an estimated 4 million companies. Microsoft has not said how many lost service, but reports of disruption have been global.
Microsoft first traced the problem to overloaded servers and applied a fix. In its latest update, Microsoft says that fix did not work as expected, and its engineers are now working on other ways to add capacity. Microsoft has not said when service will be restored. It has said there is no sign of a cyberattack.
Our advice: sit tight and Don’t Panic
Microsoft has to fix this on their end. Your computer, phone, and account are fine, and neither you nor we need to change anything. We know waiting is hard when your work depends on email. In this case it is the right thing to do.
Your mail is very likely safe. When a message cannot be delivered, the sending server holds it and tries again, and Microsoft keeps retrying its own deliveries for up to 24 hours. As Microsoft brings servers back, expect messages to arrive late and sometimes out of order. If someone tells you a message bounced, ask them to send it again once service returns.
While you wait
Call your colleagues about anything that cannot wait. There is a very good chance that their email is down too.
Leave your account settings, Mail, Outlook, and passwords alone. Changing them will not bring mail back, and it can slow your recovery.
Be suspicious of any email, text, or call that offers to fix the outage or asks you to sign in. Attackers use outages as cover. If something seems off, call us.
Follow the outage
Microsoft’s official status page, which may be slow or briefly unavailable under heavy traffic: https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365
Microsoft’s updates on X, which often appear before the status page changes: https://x.com/MSFT365Status
Downdetector, an independent site where Outlook users report problems: https://downdetector.com/status/outlook/
SecurityWeek, for a technical account of what Microsoft has confirmed: https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-365-outage-disrupts-outlook-exchange-online-and-teams/
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/12/microsoft-outage-outlook-aws-google.html
CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/tech/microsoft-outage-cripples-office-workers-nationwide
Thinking about switching Email providers?
It is a fair question, and we take it seriously. Moving email takes weeks, so it would not help today. Google and every other major provider have outages too. If this one changes how you think about the risk, contact us and we will go through your options and their costs with you once things settle down.
Communication from Feedwire
This has outage lasted far longer than anyone expected, including us. We should have reached you sooner with clear guidance, and we did not. Going forward, feedwire.com/status will carry our current read on any major provider outage, so you have one place to check.
Questions
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