Microsoft experiences global outage affecting businesses
Technology conglomerate Microsoft has experienced a global outage that started on November 12th, 2026, affecting a significant number of startups and businesses.
The services affected included Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot.
At around 18:00 GMT on Thursday, nearly 14,000 people had reported problems with Outlook – 2,000 times the normal level.
Microsoft said the cause was an elevated load on its infrastructure. This meant that some servers became unavailable and overloaded others.
The technology giant said that it was seeing improvements after being down for hours, with email queues approaching normal levels. Microsoft also reported that there was no evidence of malicious activity, although users may still experience intermittent access issues for more than 20 hours.
Over 1 million UK businesses and public-sector organisations use Microsoft’s business software, according to a 2026 CMA press release, highlighting the potential scale of disruption when essential workplace technology becomes unavailable.
The disruption could have significant consequences for businesses, including lost revenue, delayed communications that affect client relationships, reduced employee productivity, and missed sales opportunities.
For startups, which often rely on cloud-based services and digital communication tools to manage customer relationships, internal operations, and day-to-day activities, prolonged disruption could create additional operational challenges. The incident also raises questions about whether smaller businesses have adequate backup systems in place to maintain operations when essential technology services fail.
Simon Azzopardi, CEO of CoreView, which provides cyber resilience for Microsoft 365, said: “If an organisation with Microsoft’s resources and telemetry needs that long to connect a change to its impact, most businesses will struggle to understand what changed in their tenant and when.
“Businesses can’t control Microsoft’s infrastructure. But they can control their own tenant. That means knowing exactly how it is configured, tracking every change made to it, and being able to restore it to a known good state quickly.
“As services recover, IT teams should do three things. Confirm that security and compliance controls such as data loss prevention, sensitivity labelling and Intune compliance policies are working as intended. Review every emergency change made during the outage, because workarounds made under pressure tend to become permanent gaps. And treat delayed email with extra caution: Microsoft warned that Safe Links might not be able to check URLs during the disruption, and attackers routinely use outages as cover.”
This is a developing story. We’ll give updates on the situation as we learn more. 16:00pm 13/11/2026
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