Outlook Down? Five Things to Do (and Not Do) During a Microsoft 365 Outage

Microsoft Outlook outage November 2026

From about 11:30 p.m. IST on Thursday, 12 November 2026, Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services stopped working for users in many countries. Microsoft says the cause is a server problem inside its own system, not a cyberattack. If your inbox would not open, your laptop, internet and password were not the problem.

What we know so far

  • The main service hit is Exchange Online, which runs Outlook email on web, desktop and mobile.
  • Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, OneDrive, OneNote and To Do were also affected.
  • Microsoft says several servers suddenly became unavailable, so the remaining ones were overloaded.
  • Admins can track incident numbers MO1550821 and EX1550543 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

What your team should do

  • Check Microsoft's official status page before changing anything on your PC.
  • Do not keep resetting passwords or reinstalling Outlook. It cannot fix a server-side fault.
  • Use phone, WhatsApp or SMS for urgent client messages.
  • Do not resend the same email many times. Every copy may arrive later.
  • Ignore any call, email or link that offers to "fix" Outlook. Banks have already warned about fake support scams.

The bigger lesson: decide your backup channel, a second email route and a one-page outage plan before the next outage, not during it.

Read the full outage explainer here: Microsoft Outlook Outage: What Happened and What to Do Now

Published by Affix Center, a Mumbai-based IT services company. Learn about our managed IT support and patching services.

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