An outage that began Thursday with Outlook and Teams ended up hitting most of Microsoft’s cloud, and traffic returned only after roughly 18 hours, TechCrunch reported on 13 November. That duration comes from Doug Madory of Kentik, the firm that monitors internet traffic worldwide, who leads its internet analysis.
Microsoft first described the trouble as limited to the Americas. It then spread worldwide. Consumer and business email and files failed, along with Copilot, Defender, and the Intune admin dashboards, so the people responsible for fixing tenants lost their own controls. Some users also reported trouble reaching cloud-based Windows computers.
Microsoft has not given a cause. It says a large share of its servers dropped out unexpectedly, that it is still investigating, and that it sees no evidence of malicious activity. A spokesperson did not answer TechCrunch’s question about whether Microsoft keeps the logs needed to check that claim.
The last major incident came in September, when Microsoft blamed a core authentication configuration problem. Any company running identity, security, and admin consoles on one vendor should confirm it has a way into those consoles when that vendor is down.
Reported by TechCrunch on 13 November 2026, with figures attributed to Kentik and statements attributed to Microsoft.
