A widespread Microsoft 365 outage affected Outlook, Teams and other services on November 13, 2026. Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 Outlook problem reports at one point, according to IT Home’s report, which described the disruption as lasting more than 10 hours.
Japan’s government was among those affected. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed that the Government Solution Service, a shared IT system used by Japanese ministries, had experienced a failure. Email software including Outlook stopped working for government departments, affecting some operations. Digital Minister Toshiharu Furukawa said officials were using phones, chat tools and text messages to keep work moving.
Microsoft initially reported high infrastructure load across multiple regions. Its subsequent investigation ruled out a traffic surge and found that a substantial number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional pressure on those that remained. The affected servers had failed automated health checks and were marked offline.
Microsoft said it had paused deployments and configuration changes, redistributed connection traffic, restarted affected servers and tested an alternative health-check approach. At the time of IT Home’s report, service availability had not substantially recovered and Microsoft had not given a time for full restoration. The disruption also affected connection components used by OpenAI and Anthropic services.
Source: ithome.com (originally published 2026-11-13 12:10 UTC+8)