Published Nov 13, 2026 | 2:53 PM ⚊ Updated Nov 13, 2026 | 2:53 PM
The company said earlier in the day that the fix was “not taking as expected” and that it was identifying alternate workstreams to apply.
Synopsis: Microsoft attributed the ongoing outage to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, meaning computer servers are handling a much higher volume of traffic than usual. A large number of servers became “unexpectedly unavailable”, sending added traffic to the remaining servers and straining them. The tech giant ruled out a cybersecurity breach as the cause of the outage.
Amid a major outage that affected more than 430 million people worldwide, Microsoft 365 said service stability was improving, and capacity had increased following its latest traffic optimisation actions.
“We’re implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery,” it said in the latest of a series of posts on X on Friday, 13 November.
However, a complete fix is likely to take more time.
The latest update came after the company said earlier in the day that the fix was “not taking as expected” and that it was identifying alternate workstreams to apply.
The outage started on Thursday, with monitoring website Downdetector seeing issues in at least 74 countries.
The more-than-12-hour outage has left millions worldwide without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools, and other staples of modern office life. Banks, governments and courts in multiple countries are affected.
Microsoft earlier said it had “observed marginal success” in solving the problem. A cybersecurity breach did not cause the outage, the tech giant said.
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The Redmond, Washington-based IT behemoth attributed the ongoing outage to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, meaning computer servers are handling a much higher volume of traffic than usual.
Many servers became “unexpectedly unavailable”, sending added traffic to the remaining servers and straining them.
Microsoft said it was still working on ways to fix the issue.
The firm said it has “engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact” and return services to “a healthy state”.
It also said it was seeing “partial recovery” across regions where it has applied fixes, but that these actions were not “resulting in sustained recovery”.
The restored servers were stable, and Microsoft was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while working to bring the remaining affected servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said.
The outage affected business services that rely on Microsoft’s systems. More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use its Copilot AI chatbot, according to the company’s website. Indian companies set to report quarterly results today, and some that announced them earlier, are mostly in wait-and-watch mode as they plan calls with investors and analysts.
“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a Post-Incident Report,” Microsoft said.
(Edited by Majnu Babu).
