Microsoft experienced a significant outage on Thursday, November 12, 2026, disrupting services like Outlook, Teams, and 365 for thousands of users across North America. The issue began shortly before 1 p.m. ET and was also reported by users of Amazon Web Services and Google, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
The outage was attributed to an elevated load across multiple regions, which likely caused connectivity errors. Microsoft 365 Status account posted on social media platform X shortly after 1:30 p.m. ET, stating that a portion of the infrastructure was experiencing increased strain.
Microsoft identified the root cause as an increase in unavailable servers and initiated a restart of the affected servers. The company noted that the shutdown may be linked to failed health checks due to a specific component responsible for processing server health.
In response, Microsoft took steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while working to restore the affected servers to service.