The Independent published a round-up of the organisations affected. It isn't a complete list, and the paper said it would keep updating it. Official notices from the organisations involved, plus reporting from other outlets, fill in more detail on what broke, what didn't, and what IT teams should take from it.
What actually broke
The Independent quoted Microsoft as saying the incident affected "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region". The paper listed Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Microsoft 365 and Copilot among the affected services. Those services were not all down in the same way, though.
According to MacRumors, Microsoft's service health page says affected users may have trouble opening mailboxes through Outlook on the web, desktop, and mobile. Messages may also be delayed. The problem sat in Microsoft's infrastructure, not in Outlook itself, so Exchange accounts accessed through other clients such as Apple Mail are also experiencing problems. Switching email clients would not have helped.
The damage spread to other features that depend on Exchange. MacRumors reported that Microsoft has identified additional problems involving Planner, To Do, administrative tools, and some SharePoint functions, although files stored directly in SharePoint remain accessible. It also noted that Microsoft Teams is not entirely offline.
SBS News gave the longest list, citing Microsoft's Service Health Status site: Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive, Copilot, SharePoint Online, Defender XDR, Fabric, Graph, Intune, Planner, Purview, To Do, Power BI, Microsoft 365 Apps, the Admin Center and Universal Print.
Dynamics 365 was hit separately. CX Today reported that Dynamics 365 Contact Center went down for just under eight hours on Thursday evening. Agents could not get into the workspace. Voice and messaging stopped. Microsoft says it restored agent access at 00:57 GMT on Friday.
Section summary: This was mainly an Exchange Online problem. It spread to calendars, Copilot, Planner, admin tools and third-party connectors. Files stored directly in SharePoint stayed reachable, and Teams was degraded but not fully down.
Government agencies: four countries, specific systems
The Independent reported that government departments in Australia, Japan, Singapore and the United States were affected:
- United States: The Independent reported that the US House of Representatives was working directly with Microsoft engineers to restore email and workspace access. We could not confirm this independently, so it rests on The Independent's report.
- Australia: SBS News reported that the Australian Federal Police and ASIO, the country's intelligence agency, both confirmed they were affected. SBS also listed the governments of the Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and Western Australia, and courts in South Australia and Victoria. Service NSW said some transactions were unavailable. According to SBS, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had spoken to National Cyber Security Coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness and Microsoft Australia and New Zealand president Jane Livesey. Burke said Microsoft believed it was dealing with "an update that has gone awry", and he compared the downstream effects to the July 2024 CrowdStrike incident.
- Japan: The Independent reported that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed that parts of the government's IT infrastructure had been hit.
- Singapore: The Independent said government agencies reported disruption on Friday morning.
None of these reports describes a whole government going offline. In each case, specific systems, mostly email and workspace tools, stopped working.
Health services: email failed, clinical care carried on
The Independent reported that the NHS warned some patients might struggle to get medications. It also quoted a National Pharmacy Association spokesperson saying the outage "affects a pharmacy's ability to communicate with GP practices and some patients". We could not find these specific claims elsewhere, so they rest on The Independent's reporting.
Individual NHS trusts published their own notices, and they were more reassuring:
- Isle of Wight NHS Trust said the main impact was on staff email and some administrative systems, so some enquiries and non-urgent requests could take longer. Ambulances kept responding to emergency calls and hospital teams kept treating patients. The trust told patients to:
- attend planned appointments unless their care team contacted them
- call 999 or go to A&E for life-threatening emergencies
- use NHS 111 for urgent advice that isn't an emergency
- phone rather than email with urgent enquiries
- University College London Hospitals said it temporarily could not send or receive email. Procedures and appointments were going ahead as planned, though some virtual clinics might be replaced with phone calls. Urgent contact was to go to the relevant clinic or the switchboard.
This matches The Independent's line that staff email was down across several regions while patient appointments should go ahead. Hospital systems are built on the assumption that email can fail, and that assumption held this time.
AI firms: when your integration sits on someone else's server
The Independent reported that Anthropic and OpenAI both had problems because their products connect to Microsoft's systems. The status pages give more precise detail.
Anthropic's status page recorded an incident starting at 17:52 UTC on November 12. It reported errors and slow responses in its Microsoft 365 connector, covering mail, SharePoint, Teams chat and calendar requests, and said new connections might not complete. At 18:34 UTC Anthropic said it had found a problem with an "upstream provider". By 22:23 UTC it attributed the failures to a Microsoft 365 service incident. Mail, calendar and search tools were still failing for most requests, and Claude for Outlook was still affected. An earlier update said some users could not open the Outlook add-in at all.
The same page listed the Claude API as operational, so the Microsoft problem broke integrations rather than Anthropic's core platform. Anthropic also logged a separate incident on November 13 involving sign-ins to Claude.ai and Claude Code, which it marked resolved at 11:58 UTC. Nothing on the page connects that incident to Microsoft.
The Independent quoted OpenAI's status report: "We're investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken, and tools are not working as expected." A third-party status aggregator showed the same wording, with an incident start time of 18:29 UTC on November 12. That points to broken connectors, not ChatGPT being down.
MacRumors summed it up: the disruption has reached third-party AI services that connect to Microsoft accounts. When your AI assistant's skills depend on someone else's mail server, an outage there becomes yours too.
Schools and universities: work locally, and watch for phishing
The Independent reported that the University of Manchester told staff to use phone calls and text messages for urgent communications and to save work on their own computers. The university's StaffNet notices give more detail:
- Urgent internal communications: agree an alternative channel with your team.
- Files: save documents locally rather than relying on OneDrive or SharePoint, and avoid repeatedly trying to sync while services are disrupted.
- External deadlines: phone partners where possible.
- Security: treat unexpected messages offering Microsoft password resets or outage fixes with suspicion, and follow only official IT channels.
The university's 12:15pm update on Friday said Microsoft was reporting encouraging recovery in Europe and some email was starting to arrive. It also told staff to check whether any critical systems that depend on Microsoft were still working, and to put business continuity arrangements in place where needed.
In Australia, SBS reported that the Northern Territory Department of Education saw technical problems in schools. Charles Sturt University and Macquarie University said the outage was also affecting multi-factor authentication, which is a bigger problem than lost email.
The Independent quoted Ali Yavari, an associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, speaking to ABC News. He warned that the "consequences can outlast the outage itself", because frustrated staff may turn to personal email, unmanaged devices or unapproved file-sharing. This is a warning about what could happen, not a report of a breach. But security teams that have cleaned up after past emergency workarounds will recognise the risk.
Scale, cause and the "second time this year" question
The Independent said disruption was reported across 74 countries. According to The Washington Post, Downdetector said almost 130,000 problems with Microsoft Outlook had been reported by U.S. users just after 1 p.m. Thursday, with outage reports reaching 74 countries and territories in about an hour. That figure counts places where users filed reports. It does not measure how many people or organisations were affected, and the Post noted that it is not clear how many users have been affected.
On the cause, SBS quoted Microsoft as saying that "a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed", which made servers stop responding and reduced capacity. ANU computer science associate professor Alex Potanin described what followed to SBS: servers that failed health checks dropped offline, and the remaining servers became overloaded as they took on the extra work. Microsoft has repeatedly said it has no evidence of malicious activity. CX Today quoted its service health update: "As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident."
Recovery has been uneven. Outlook India reported that Microsoft's status account said some availability changes were "not taking as expected", and that Microsoft was looking at other ways to fix it.
The Independent called this the second Microsoft 365 breakdown of the year. The previous one is well documented. In January, The Register reported that many users found Microsoft 365 services suddenly unavailable or sluggish. In addition to Outlook, Defender and Purview were also downed. That outage was fixed almost ten hours after the company first admitted there was a problem. The November incident has already run well past that, and its effects have spread much further.
The Independent also said some experts think this could become one of the most economically damaging technology outages ever. That is a forecast, not a measurement. In Australia, RSM's Ashwin Pal told SBS the cost there could reach billions of dollars once indirect losses are included.
What Windows and Microsoft 365 admins should do now
Based on Microsoft's published guidance and the institutional notices above:
- Use the tenant view, not social media. In a Microsoft Q&A thread, the guidance was to monitor Microsoft 365 admin center → Health → Service health for tenant-specific recovery updates rather than troubleshoot individual devices. Reinstalling Outlook won't help with a problem on Microsoft's servers.
- Track the incident IDs. CX Today cited Microsoft service health incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821 for the wider outage and CR1550885 for Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
- Expect delayed mail, not lost mail. MacRumors reported that Microsoft has increased the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while backlogs clear. Prepare for a flood of late messages once delivery recovers.
- Tell users about the phishing risk. "Click here to fix your Outlook" emails are exactly what attackers send during an outage. Manchester's warning is worth copying.
- Check what else depends on Exchange. Look at Copilot, third-party AI connectors, Power BI reports, Planner workflows, shared printers and MFA flows. If any of them depend on Microsoft 365, add them to your continuity plan.
- Handle the workarounds afterwards. Once service is restored, check which files moved to personal accounts or USB sticks while email was down. Yavari's warning is the reason this matters.
The bottom line
The sectors on The Independent's list — government, healthcare, AI and education — have one thing in common: Exchange Online sits underneath a lot of services people don't think of as email. Organisations that already had a fallback, such as switchboard numbers, saving files locally and agreed backup channels, managed. Those without one were, in RSM's Ashwin Pal's words to SBS, left at a standstill.
Microsoft has not yet published a final post-incident review or given a time for full recovery. Two major outages in one year means admins should get the review when it arrives and read it closely.
Correction (November 13, 2026): The opening paragraph originally said the outage was "still unresolved more than a day after it began." At publication (08:02 EST Friday), about 21 hours had passed since Microsoft logged the Exchange Online incident EX1550543 at 16:17 UTC on Thursday, November 12, so the text now reads "more than 20 hours."
Update: Microsoft reportedly restarts affected servers as recovery continues (November 13, 2026)
According to Technetbook, Microsoft engineers are draining traffic and restarting affected server nodes after initial attempts to apply patches failed to resolve the disruption. The outlet reports gradual recovery across North America, Europe and parts of Asia Pacific, but says a complete resolution remains out of reach.
Technetbook also reports that users may continue to experience intermittent connection failures and delayed email while the backlog clears.
Update: Additional details (November 13, 2026)
Computer Weekly reported that the UK Planning Inspectorate paused its Manage Appeals Service for new submissions and customer access. Police Scotland could not receive email and warned that responses to forms might be delayed.
The report also said the UK Supreme Court was not receiving email, although its online contact forms and portal remained operational.