On 12 November 2026, it was reported that Microsoft 365 was experiencing an outage that affected its services, causing major disruption to businesses and governments worldwide. The impacted services included Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, SharePoint, and Copilot, among others.
The ORX News team analysed the story from an operational risk perspective, identifying the potential implications for financial organisations managing cyber-related risks. Our community of members and subscribers can log in to read the full article, which examines the causes and impacts of the Microsoft 365 outage.
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ORX News article: Microsoft 365 outage disrupts businesses globally
According to bbc.co.uk, the first reports of issues with Microsoft were recorded at around 16:15 GMT on 12 November 2026 and peaked globally with 140,000 reports at around 18:00 GMT the same day. Reports on outage monitoring platform downdetector.com surged in a one-hour period and spanned 74 countries. As of 13:00 GMT on 13 November 2026, the incident remained ongoing.
Microsoft struggled to restore services, stating that its fixes were not succeeding as expected and that it was facing issues on multiple fronts. At 10:30 GMT on 13 November 2026, Microsoft stated that there had been incremental improvement and that recovery actions had been completed across portions of the affected infrastructure.
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