Microsoft Outage Update: What Is Working, What Is Not, and Why the Fix Is Taking So Long

One of Microsoft’s biggest outages of the year has entered its second day. Outlook, Teams and several other Microsoft 365 services went down for millions of users on Thursday night, and while the company says services are now recovering, the problem is still not fully fixed. In its latest update on Friday evening, Microsoft reported “encouraging recovery progress” but warned that intermittent issues may continue.

The outage has affected users in at least 74 countries, hitting businesses and public services alike. Here is the latest on what is working, what is not, what went wrong and why the fix is taking so long.

Microsoft Outage: What Is Working and What Is Not

Recovery has been uneven across regions. Microsoft completed its recovery steps first on parts of its Asia-Pacific systems, and has since reported wider improvement in North America and across much of Europe. Even in these regions, access can still drop in and out, because the company is deliberately limiting some types of traffic while it brings servers back.

What Went Wrong

The trouble started on Thursday, November 12, at around 9:45 pm IST, when users in the Americas began losing access to their Exchange Online mailboxes. Within about two hours, it had grown into a wider Microsoft 365 incident affecting several services around the world.

Microsoft has not yet shared the root cause. What it has said is that “a large number of servers” became “unexpectedly unavailable”. This pushed extra load onto the servers that were still running, and a core process on those machines then became overwhelmed, which reduced capacity even further.

The company’s updates also point to a problem with its automated health checks, the system that decides whether a server is fit to handle traffic. Experts who have studied Microsoft’s updates believe these checks may have been wrongly taking healthy servers out of service, though this has not been confirmed. Microsoft has said that no recent change clearly matches the start of the outage, and that it is still looking at a small number of configuration updates as possible causes.

Is It a Cyber Attack? Is Your Data Safe?

Microsoft has said there is “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident”, and no group has claimed responsibility. Nothing in the company’s updates suggests that emails or files have been lost or exposed. This is mainly an access problem, where the data is intact but users cannot reach it.

Emails sent during the outage are not expected to disappear either. Microsoft has extended its email delivery window to 48 hours, so delayed messages should still arrive once the backlog is cleared.

Why Is It Taking So Long to Fix?

There are four main reasons behind the slow recovery.

• No confirmed root cause: Without knowing exactly what broke, engineers have had to try one fix after another. Microsoft itself admitted at one stage that its changes were “not taking as expected”.
• Servers kept failing again: Machines that were restarted looked healthy at first, but became unresponsive once real traffic was sent back to them.
• Traffic has to return slowly: If all users are let back in at once, the recovering servers could be overwhelmed again. So Microsoft is adding traffic back in stages and has said capacity “has not yet returned to normal levels”.
• A huge backlog of email: Millions of delayed emails are waiting in queues and have to be processed even after the servers are stable.

Over the past day, Microsoft has tried moving traffic to other regions, restarting servers, rebuilding some of them with an earlier software setup and changing how health checks work. The step that finally showed results was a patch to a component that handles sign-in and routing of requests, which the company is now rolling out region by region.

Microsoft Outage Timeline

What Users Should Do Now

• Do not reset passwords or reinstall Outlook. The problem is on Microsoft’s side and these steps will not help.
• Do not resend emails that seem stuck. They should be delivered once the queues clear, and resending will only create duplicates.
• Check Microsoft’s official service status page for live updates. IT admins can track the incident under the IDs EX1550543 and MO1550821.
• Be careful of scam emails, calls and messages that use the outage as an excuse to ask for passwords or remote access.
• For urgent work, use phone calls or other communication tools until Teams and Outlook are stable.

When Will Microsoft Services Be Fully Restored?

Microsoft has not given a time for full restoration. Network traffic to its services began returning to normal after roughly 18 hours of disruption, but the company expects on-and-off problems to continue for some time, and delayed emails could take several more hours to arrive. It has promised a detailed report on the cause once services are fully back.

This is the latest in a series of major Microsoft 365 outages in 2026, after disruptions in January, August and September, and it has once again raised questions about how much of the world’s daily work depends on a handful of cloud companies.

This is a developing story and will be updated as Microsoft shares more information.