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Thousands of people were locked out of their inboxes on November 12, 2026, when Microsoft’s Outlook email service suffered a massive outage across North America, Variety reported. The disruption also spread to Teams, Copilot and SharePoint, leaving users wondering how often the company goes dark.
As it turns out, Microsoft has suffered plenty of meltdowns before.
Find out how many times Microsoft has gone down below.
How Many Microsoft Outages Have There Been?
Counting the latest one, at least 10 widespread outages and disruptions have hit Microsoft users and made headlines since January 2023. Some cleared up within a few hours, while others dragged on for most of a day or longer, and together they have knocked out everything from Outlook and Teams to Xbox.
What Happened During the Microsoft Outage?
By around 1:30 p.m. ET, more than 120,000 users had reported trouble accessing Outlook on Downdetector, according to NBC News.
Microsoft acknowledged the outage at 12:54 p.m. ET in a post on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543,” the company wrote.
Roughly 40 minutes later, the same account said a portion of infrastructure experiencing elevated load across multiple regions was likely contributing to the connectivity errors, and Microsoft began redistributing connection traffic worldwide to balance it. Get the latest restoration updates here.
Biggest Microsoft Outages Over the Years
January 2023
A network change cut users around the world off from Teams, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services until the company rolled it back, CNBC explained.
July 2024
A faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected 8.5 million Windows devices, sending airlines and businesses scrambling, as NBC News documented. Here’s a closer look at what happened with CrowdStrike.
September 2024
Excel, Teams, Outlook and Word stopped working for more than 20,000 users during a Microsoft 365 outage.
November 2024
Outlook and Teams broke down just days before Thanksgiving, and service wasn’t fully restored for more than 24 hours, leaving users checking whether Outlook was down again and again.
March 2025
More than 32,000 users flagged Outlook issues by 4 p.m. ET as the email app faltered in early March.
July 2025
Outlook.com, along with the Outlook mobile apps and desktop programs, malfunctioned for more than 21 hours before Microsoft’s fix reached every user, per CNBC.
October 2025
An inadvertent configuration change triggered an Azure outage that rippled into Microsoft 365 and took down Microsoft’s own Xbox pages, while Alaska Airlines said key systems, including its websites, were disrupted, CNBC wrote.
January 2026
Users struggled to send and receive Outlook email during U.S. business hours, and the incident lasted nearly 11 hours before Microsoft said it was resolved at 1:29 a.m. ET, as CNBC detailed.
August 2026
Microsoft confirmed degraded Exchange Online functionality on August 31 as close to 4,600 Outlook users logged complaints on Downdetector, CNBC noted.
November 2026
The newest outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot through the early afternoon, and Microsoft soon confirmed on X that the issue could reach Microsoft 365 users in any region.
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JL Iseminger
Almontather Rassoul
