Share to ClassroomMicrosoft Outage Stops Outlook and Teams Worldwide
On Thursday 12 November, Microsoft 365 stopped working for many people around the world. Microsoft 365 is a group of programs, including Outlook for email and Teams for online meetings. This kind of problem is called an outage. People sent nearly 130,000 problem reports from 74 countries, and more than 430 million people use these programs. Services started to come back on Friday. News reports said the outage lasted between about 18 and 24 hours.
Microsoft said a technical mistake happened during a network upgrade. It was not a cyber-attack. In the UK, police asked people to phone them instead of reporting crimes online. One pharmacy could not get patient information from a hospital by email, so someone drove there to collect the papers. A pharmacy leader said it was "what we used to do 20 years ago". In the US, workers at the House of Representatives lost a whole day of work.
Microsoft said it was "deeply sorry". When its email worked again, one US police department joked that this was not the result it wanted. Some people online joked about a 1960 study that said "doomsday" would come on 13 November 2026. Experts said some workers may have enjoyed a day with no email. But they warned that we rely heavily on a few big tech companies.
