Microsoft shifts traffic and freezes changes as outage hits Copilot and workplace services

Business customers faced trouble reaching Microsoft’s email, collaboration and AI services after a widespread Microsoft 365 outage on November 12, 2026. Microsoft warned that users in any region could be affected. It began moving connection traffic and paused deployments while investigating; restoration efforts remained the subject of Financial Times coverage on November 13.

Microsoft’s service health page identified five affected services: Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365 and Defender XDR. Users could have trouble accessing those services, rather than necessarily experiencing the same failure across every product. Microsoft subsequently clarified that the incident affected Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers, not its consumer technology products.

The geographic warning widened soon after Microsoft’s initial acknowledgment at 12:54 p.m. ET. Its first notice described problems with email inboxes in the Americas. At 1:07 p.m. ET, the company said Microsoft 365 connectivity could be affected in any region and directed administrators to incident EX1550543.

User reports extended beyond that official service list. Mashable reported sharply elevated Downdetector activity for Teams, Outlook, Copilot AI, Microsoft 365, Azure and Microsoft Store. Those reports described where people were encountering problems; Microsoft’s own customer-scope update specifically identified its business and enterprise services.

As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event.

Microsoft, in a status update quoted by Mashable

Microsoft’s response combined traffic changes with work on the affected servers. The company said it had begun redistributing connections across its broader worldwide infrastructure to balance load. It also moved traffic for some services away from affected infrastructure, with further moves underway to reduce pressure there.

A 2:50 p.m. ET update offered a more specific technical symptom: servers were failing automated health checks and becoming unavailable. Microsoft said it was testing a configuration change to address that problem. It was also restarting affected servers in an attempt to restore service.

By 3:10 p.m. ET, Microsoft said it was deploying multiple mitigations to restore service.

For some customers, the disruption also complicated the task of checking what was wrong. Microsoft said users might be unable to access the Microsoft 365 admin center, the destination it had given for the incident details. It directed those users to its public service status webpage instead.

That alternative was not consistently reachable either: multiple Mashable reporters found the public status page down for part of the day. Microsoft also published recovery updates through its Microsoft 365 Status account on X, including its notice that it was pursuing multiple ways to reduce the impact.