Microsoft was restoring access to Teams, Outlook and the rest of the Microsoft 365 applications on Friday, November 13, 2026, following an outage that lasted more than 12 hours and that the company attributed to servers that stopped responding during automated reviews, according to The Guardian.
The company ruled out a cyberattack and described the failure as a capacity problem: part of its infrastructure was operating under heavy load, which fueled the connectivity errors. The Down Detector site counted nearly 130,000 outage reports across 74 countries by 18:00 GMT on Thursday, November 12, with impacts on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. Al Jazeera documented that the outage reached businesses and several government operations around the world. For Mexico, the episode exposes the operational dependence of law firms, banks and public offices that run on the same suite: Microsoft reports more than 430 million Microsoft 365 users, and more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot, its artificial intelligence assistant.
Recovery actions were completed first in the Asia Pacific region and traffic was restored gradually, although Microsoft warned that some users were still experiencing intermittent problems with their mailbox and with the processing of delayed email. The outage also touched external connectors: OpenAI reported failures in its connections with Microsoft, and Anthropic identified a problem with its Microsoft 365 connector. Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, wrote on X that the company regrets the disruptions and is working to address the problem. The pattern specialists describe is cascading saturation: when part of the capacity is lost, the remaining traffic overloads the available servers and the service goes down again.
The next point to watch is the post-incident report Microsoft promised to publish, with the root cause and the fixes applied. The episode leaves a signal for business continuity teams in Mexico and the region: the availability of a single cloud provider becomes an operational risk shared by the public and private sectors.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.