Microsoft services like Outlook and Teams remained disrupted on Friday, November 13, for users in India and elsewhere. The company said it is not aware of any malicious activity behind the global outage. Microsoft is working to fix its backend servers as many firms face delays in their daily work.
Microsoft’s workplace services, including Outlook and Teams, remained disrupted for users in India and elsewhere on Friday (November 13, 2026), a day after a global outage began, with the company saying it was still working to pinpoint the cause and is not aware of any malicious activity behind it.
Microsoft’s service health page showed “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as its consumer products, as of an update at 11.16 am India time on Friday (November 13, 2026).
The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the underlying cause of a traffic influx and to recover its backend servers.
“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident,” it said, adding that full details of the root cause would be shared in a post-incident report once the issue is mitigated.
- PTI
Microsoft said Thursday (November 13, 2026) that it was not aware of any “malicious activity” behind the hours-long disruption of its Outlook services.
“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution,” Microsoft said.
- AFP
“For a city whose economy runs on serving global clients, [the outage] is no minor inconvenience,” Sambratha Shetty, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Synergia Foundation, said. “Bengaluru’s IT firms, startups and global capability centres coordinate across time zones through email, Teams calls and shared files. When those stop, client deliveries slip, support queues pile up, and teams sit idle. For outsourcing contracts bound by strict service-level agreements, even a few hours of downtime can mean penalties and strained client trust.”
“Bengaluru’s tech leaders should treat cloud failure as certain, not hypothetical. That means backup communication channels, multi-vendor setups and regularly tested continuity plans. The city that builds resilient systems for the world must build them for itself,” the COO said.
- Mini Tejaswi
The Microsoft outage has affected operations at one of the Big Four professional services firms, with much of its internal work dependent on Microsoft’s services, a senior employee said, requesting anonymity as the company was not to be identified.
The firm’s internal IT teams are working to address the disruption, with services gradually being restored. Microsoft is prioritising service restoration in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, according to an update shared by the firm’s IT team with employees.
The IT team is closely monitoring the situation and awaiting complete restoration of services, the employee said.
- Balasubramanyam C. P.
The number of affected services comes with significant consequences for not just professional users, but entire sectors. Consider a few examples. With Microsoft 365 Admin Center affected, administrators may not be able to load crucial pages. With Apps down, many users can’t see their recent files. Since Microsoft 365 Education is affected, students/teachers may not be able to use offerings such as Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress. Coming to Microsoft Copilot 365, AI users may find it difficult to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps. Furthermore, using Copilot to access work materials might be challenging.
Cybersecurity is also at risk; with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 not functioning as intended, Safe Links might be unable to verify URLs, per the company.
Microsoft said that users might be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services, and particularly those that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Microsoft’s Exchange Online is the cloud-based messaging platform that facilitates its users’ emails, calendars, contacts, and tasks.
Microsoft Teams users had a split experience. While some were completely unable to make or receive calls, others found that previously scheduled meetings were able to proceed as planned. Microsoft updated its website to explain that most of the core functionality of Teams was not affected, but that tasks hinging on Exchange Online were seeing failures.
Similarly, some social media users shared that they could still use their Microsoft apps at work, while others were struggling to even view their emails.
- Sahana Venugopal
Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to repair a major outage of Outlook were not going as expected and the firm was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without its crucial services.
The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, has hit email as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said on X.