Microsoft reboots servers as Outlook draws nearly 130,000 complaints

This story covers Thursday's Microsoft 365 outage and will be updated as it develops.

On Thursday, Microsoft said it was rebooting servers and rerouting traffic away from troubled systems. The outage left many users unable to access Outlook email and disrupted Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.

Outlook complaints on Downdetector began climbing around 1 p.m. ET. The tally reached nearly 130,000 shortly after 1 p.m., according to The Associated Press; at 2:07 p.m. ET, it stood above 97,000, The Independent found. Downdetector draws reports from several sources, so its counts may differ from the number of people affected.

The Independent also counted more than 38,000 Downdetector complaints concerning Microsoft 365, as well as roughly 4,500 involving Teams.

Many users said they were unable to send or receive email or open their inboxes. Thousands described trouble with Teams, the Copilot AI assistant and broader Microsoft 365 services. The Verge said people around the world reported being unable to access Outlook through apps or the web.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Status account said on X, adding that the company had paused all deployments.

We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026

The account initially flagged difficulties accessing or using Teams in North America, then reported an investigation into access to Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas. Microsoft later said the issue could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity "for users in any region."

For Teams, Microsoft later said, "Our mitigative actions have successfully restored service health and functionality." Some users nevertheless continued reporting connectivity trouble. By the time The Verge published, most people who had reported problems said Teams was working again.

It was not immediately clear when a fix would be deployed or full access restored. Whether the Teams and mailbox disruptions share a cause was also unknown.

Microsoft said elevated load across multiple regions was affecting part of its infrastructure, "which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors." The company said it would redistribute traffic to balance that load. During the disruption, Microsoft's status page itself failed to load properly.

Microsoft later said it had completed redistribution of connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure and was shifting more traffic away from affected systems. "In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure," the company said.

Microsoft integration connectors used by AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic were also affected. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue under which new connections may break and tools do not work as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an upstream provider problem affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, is tracking the incident under codes EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and the earlier Teams problem under TM1550488.

Downdetector reports declined somewhat from their peak but continued.