Service Not Improving "As Expected": Microsoft Outage Continues For 12 Hours

Microsoft's efforts to improve serviceability are not working "as expected", the company said in latest update on the global outage that has been on for over 12 hours now. The company is looking for alternative solutions.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," Microsoft said in a post on X.

The company further added that it is working to "alleviate impact, address current blocker, and return portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state."

We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/pYdahqxDv3 if the admin center is not available to you.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026

The disruption affects programs that are part of Microsoft 365 - a popular online service among businesses that allows them to use workplace tools like Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The first update from the company came on Thursday night, at 11:24 pm (IST), stating they are investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 48,000 reports of Microsoft 365 problems in the US at 11:50 pm on Thursday. At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1 pm ET on Thursday.

An hour later, the company confirmed that it's a global outage affecting Microsoft 365 service connectivity. At first the company attributed the connectivity errors to "elevated load" across regions and began redistributing connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure. Later, as the company gathered more information, it clarified that the elevated load "isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure."

Users around the world including the US, Japan and Singapore have reported facing disruptions.