Stories

Fri, 13 Nov 2026

Fri, 13 Nov 2026 Why is Microsoft's outage lasting so long and will emails be lost?

Microsoft says it is continuing to restore services including Outlook and Teams following a global outage.

* A major Microsoft outage has impacted schools, healthcare systems, businesses, courts and governments around the world.
* Services including Teams, Outlook and AI software Copilot have been affected by connectivity problems in at least 74 countries.
* The outage was caused by a technical issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade, not a cyber-security incident.
* Microsoft apologized for the disruption and said it has seen encouraging recovery progress in Europe and improvement in North America.
* The company warned that some users may still experience intermittent issues with email delivery and access to files.
* Email service Outlook appears to be resuming, but the outage has lasted over 20 hours, considered a long time in outage terms.
* Experts say the challenge is not just fixing the fault, but managing the huge surge of devices trying to reconnect once services start coming back online.
* The outage could have far-reaching consequences, affecting communication and other critical functions for millions of people.