Microsoft 365 Outage (November 2026): What’s Affected and What Your Business Should Do

Last updated: Friday, November 13, 2026, 7:00 AM Eastern (12:00 PM UTC). We’ll update this post as Microsoft releases new information.

Microsoft is working through a wide-reaching Microsoft 365 incident centered on Exchange Online. If your team has had trouble opening Outlook, noticed email arriving late, or seen Teams calendar invites fail, this is why. Here’s what’s affected, where recovery stands, and what you can do in the meantime.

The short version

• Email is the core of the problem. Users may not be able to open their mailbox in Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), and incoming and outgoing mail may be delayed.
• Delayed email is not lost email. Microsoft has extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so queued messages are held and delivered as the backlog clears.
• Teams calls, meetings, and chat still work. Only the parts of Teams that rely on Exchange (mainly calendar and scheduling) are affected.
• Your files are safe and reachable. Files stored in SharePoint Online remain accessible.
• This is not a cyberattack. Microsoft reports no evidence of malicious activity.

What’s affected

Any Microsoft 365 feature that depends on Exchange Online can be impacted. Features that don’t touch Exchange continue to work normally. The areas most small and mid-sized businesses will notice:

Email and calendar

• Exchange Online / Outlook: Mailbox access may fail in Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, and phone mail apps, and email delivery may be delayed.
• Microsoft Teams: Calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are working. Calendar scheduling, invites, and meeting edits may fail; Live and Virtual events can’t be created; adding or syncing contacts may fail; and private or shared channels can’t be created or deleted.
• Microsoft To Do and Planner: To Do may not load, and Planner tasks and plans may be unreliable.

Files and everyday apps

• SharePoint Online: Files open normally, but sharing files with people outside your organization may fail.
• Microsoft 365 apps: Your “recent files” list may not appear.
• Copilot: Copilot Chat may not load or respond, and Copilot may not be able to see your email, calendar, or files.
• Universal Print: Cloud print jobs may return errors.
• Power Apps / Field Service mobile: Sign-in may fail intermittently.
• Power BI and Microsoft Fabric: Exporting or editing reports that carry sensitivity labels may fail.

Security, compliance, and administration

• Microsoft 365 admin center and Defender portal: Some pages may not load.
• Microsoft Purview: Data Loss Prevention, sensitivity labeling, audit searches, eDiscovery, and related compliance features are impacted, and protected content may not open.
• Defender for Office 365: Policy checks that rely on Purview labels may be delayed.
• Microsoft Intune: Device enrollment, check-in, and compliance checks may have been intermittently affected.
• Microsoft Graph: Integrations and automations that read mail, calendar, or contacts through the Graph API may time out.
• Windows 365: Organizations using Purview Customer Key for Cloud PCs may have users who can’t connect.

Where recovery stands

As of Microsoft’s most recent update, recovery is progressing. Europe is seeing steady improvement in service availability and email delivery, Japan remains comparatively stable, and North America is also improving, though some users may still see intermittent issues while Microsoft continues its recovery work.

Microsoft says its priority now is clearing email queues and backlogs, and it will publish a full Post-Incident Report with the root cause once the issue is fully resolved.

What your team should do right now

1. Don’t keep re-sending emails. Messages are queued, not lost. Sending the same message several times just means your recipient gets duplicates once delivery catches up. For anything urgent, pick up the phone or use Teams chat.
2. Lean on Teams for conversations. Calls, meetings, and chat are working. If you need to set up a meeting, share a Teams meeting link in a chat rather than relying on a calendar invite.
3. Open files directly from SharePoint. If your recent files list is blank, browse to the SharePoint site or Teams channel where the file lives.
4. Stay signed in to mobile apps. If you use Power Apps or Field Service on your phone and you’re already signed in, don’t sign out, clear app data, or reinstall until the issue is resolved. The web versions are an alternative.
5. Don’t “fix” Outlook by rebuilding it. Removing and re-adding your mail profile or reinstalling Office won’t help, because the problem is on Microsoft’s side, and it can create new problems once service returns.
6. Watch for outage-themed phishing. Scammers often use major outages as cover. Be suspicious of any message asking you to “re-verify your mailbox,” “restore your account,” or sign in through a link. Microsoft will not email you asking for your password to fix this incident.

How Cross Industries is handling it

For our managed services clients, we’re monitoring Microsoft’s service health updates throughout the incident and will reach out if anything specific to your environment needs attention. Once service is fully restored, we’ll confirm mail flow, check that queued messages delivered, and review security and compliance policies that may have been delayed during the outage.

If your business is affected and you’d like a hand, or you want to talk about building more resilience into how your team communicates when a cloud service goes down, contact us or call 843.641.7644.

Source: Microsoft 365 Service Health incident notice, last updated November 13, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC.