Is Outlook Still Down? Microsoft Fixes Outage as Email Services Recover Worldwide
Microsoft Outlook has returned to normal after a major global outage that disrupted email traffic on November 12 and 13, 2026. Microsoft confirmed that the root cause technical issue was resolved, which improved email delivery and mailbox access for the impacted regions. Some users may still experience temporary errors or delays when connecting as the other systems come back online.
Microsoft Outlook Outage Current Status
Microsoft’s update on Nov. 13 confirmed big gains in service availability in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Our engineers have made good progress in bringing back a large portion of server capacity to normal and the email queues that had built up during the disruption have been substantially drained.
Microsoft has not yet confirmed the full restoration of all impacted environments, although Outlook is now working for a lot of customers. Recovery is being tested using different connection methods (outlook on the web, desktop apps, mobile email services).
What is the status of Microsoft 365 and Outlook?
On Thursday, November 12, users reported difficulty in connecting to Microsoft 365 services, sending messages and accessing their inboxes.
The number of Outlook problem reports recorded by Downdetector was similar, reaching close to 130,000 near the first peak. In a number of countries, businesses and individuals reported disruption to their normal communication.
That influence extended beyond e-mail. Microsoft Teams experienced problems with calendar scheduling and meeting invitations, and some Copilot features couldn’t access related work information. There were also intermittent failures with SharePoint, Microsoft Graph and some admin features.
But the messaging and meeting capabilities of Core Teams were still available in many environments.
What was behind the Outlook outage?
Microsoft said the incident was caused by a network capacity upgrade that was introduced previously and reoccurred after another network change.
The affected servers were unavailable, so additional workloads were loaded onto the remaining infrastructure. And an overloaded process was preventing some servers from processing requests, so secure connections could not be established.
Microsoft engineers worked to restore the affected infrastructure, gradually making configuration changes and rerouting network traffic. We checked the stability of each recovery phase before allowing more connections.
What happens to emails that were sent during the outage?
Messages got backed up in the processing queues, leading to significant email delivery delays.
Microsoft also lengthened its email timeout window to 48 hours during the recovery process, to preserve delayed messages while systems worked through the backlog. The aim of this measure was to reduce the likelihood of messages timing out before delivery, rather than to ensure that all emails were delivered within 48 hours.
Once access is restored, users should check their Inbox, Sent Items and Outbox. If you are sending something important for business, you should confirm with the recipient that they have received it.
Testing Outlook’s Performance
If you are experiencing problems, please check the reported service health on Microsoft’s official Service Health page, https://status.cloud.microsoft/.
Business admins in Microsoft 365 can view more incident details in the Service Health dashboard in the admin center. Incident MO1550821 points to the larger Microsoft 365 disruption that was linked to the Nov. 12 outage.
Before you make any changes to account settings or reinstall apps, check the health of the service so you do not waste time troubleshooting during recovery. If you have an Outlook account that you can not access,
Microsoft Outlook Outlook
Microsoft is continuing to monitor email processing and connection reliability as services come back online. A full post-incident report will be released following the technical review of the incident.
For Outlook users, the first thing to check is that the inbox, outgoing messages and incoming email delivery are working consistently. Microsoft’s most recent updates indicate that a lot of progress is being made and the last step is to restore affected customers’ performance to normal.