A global service outage affecting Microsoft 365 began Thursday morning, November 12, 2026, disrupting email, messaging, and cloud productivity applications across multiple regions, according to official status advisories from Microsoft.
Microsoft initially reported investigating connectivity issues affecting Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas before confirming at 10:07am PST that the disruption could affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region worldwide, according to Microsoft 365 Status advisories.
Officials with Whatcom County reported about 10:45am that their offices were impacted by the outage and not reachable by email. Phone system was working normally.
South Whatcom Fire Authority announced that due to the outage, “availability for broadcasting and joining today’s Public Hearing and Regular Board of Commissioners meeting may be questionable. This situation is out of our hands, and we will make attempts to provide online access as normal, but we cannot guarantee online access. In-person attendance is welcome and encouraged.”
According to Microsoft service degradation alerts, the outage was caused by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, shifting elevated load onto remaining infrastructure rather than stemming from an overall spike in user traffic. At 10:48am PST, Microsoft began redistributing connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure, paused all deployments and configuration changes, and initiated restarts of affected servers to restore service.
Microsoft service status advisories and incident tracking logged under reference numbers EX1550543 and MO1550821 identified service degradation across the following primary platforms.
- Exchange Online and Outlook (including Outlook.com)
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Online
- OneDrive
- Microsoft Copilot 365
- Microsoft Defender XDR
- Microsoft 365 desktop and web suite applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)
At the peak of the disruption around 10:20am PST, user-submitted outage reports on Downdetector exceeded 130,000 for Microsoft Outlook and reached nearly 50,000 for the broader Microsoft 365 suite. (Note: Downdetector figures rely on unverified user submissions and serve as a single-source indicator of user-reported volume rather than certified system telemetry.)
As of 1pm PST, some users reportedly continued to have problems accessing services.
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