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Microsoft 365 outage on Friday the 13th: what happened and what to do

Outlook, Teams and SharePoint went down across Australia on 13 November 2026, so here is what Microsoft said and what to do in an outage.

Geidi Cloud Team8 min read

A woman on the phone at her desk watching a laptop that is still loading, colleagues waiting at their screens behind her

In brief

What it is
From about 2am Perth time on Friday 13 November 2026, a Microsoft fault stopped many people reaching Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 services.
Who it affects
Organisations on Microsoft 365 in Australia and around the world, from small businesses to government agencies.
What to do
Check Microsoft's status page before changing anything, keep using Outlook's offline copy, tell customers another way, and watch for scam calls.
On this page
  1. How bad was it?
  2. What Microsoft has said
  3. Is it you, or is it Microsoft?
  4. What to do while it's down
  5. What to fix once it's back
  6. Where Geidi fits
  7. Sources

At about 2am Perth time on Friday 13 November 2026, Microsoft 365 started falling over. Microsoft first reported trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas. Within hours its status page also listed Teams, SharePoint and Copilot. Downdetector had reports from 74 countries and territories within about an hour, CNN reported. Downdetector's US site peaked at more than 120,000 reports for Outlook alone before most of Australia was at work, the ABC reported, and plenty of Australian businesses started the day with no email.

If Outlook wouldn't open on Friday morning, it wasn't your computer and it wasn't your internet. Here's what Microsoft has said, and what to do so the next one costs you less.

How bad was it?

Bad enough to reach Australia's spy agency and the federal police, which the ABC and CNN reported were among the organisations caught up in it. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him it didn't believe it was dealing with a cyber attack, and that the government had activated its formal cyber agreement with Microsoft so Australian interests would be prioritised in the recovery.

For businesses the cost was more direct. The ABC reported shops losing sales that come in by email, patients losing access to telehealth services, distance schools closing for the day, and some small businesses losing up to $30,000 in a day. CNN reported Australian businesses unable to print invoices. One Adelaide business owner told the ABC he was losing thousands of dollars because orders weren't coming in and invoices weren't going out.

It isn't the first time this year either: The Register reported a Microsoft 365 outage of nearly 10 hours in January. Two in one year is reason enough to plan for the next.

What Microsoft has said

Microsoft posts its updates on the Microsoft 365 Status account on X and on its status page. In the Microsoft 365 admin center they're incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821.

Its first post said it was investigating reports of people having trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes "through multiple connection methods" in the Americas. It then said the strain wasn't from extra traffic: a large number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, failing automated health checks, and their load was falling on the servers still running. It paused all deployments and configuration changes while it looked at recent ones, but said it hadn't found any recent change linked to the start of the outage, and that the failed health checks may come from a component that processes server health. As well as Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot, the ABC reported that Microsoft's status page also listed Defender, Planner, Intune and Power BI, among others.

Over the following hours it restarted affected servers, began rolling out an alternative health check method and shifted traffic to other routes. Some restored servers became unresponsive again, which Microsoft put down to a process "responsible for establishing secure connections" being overwhelmed, the ABC reported. Around lunchtime Friday, Perth time, it said its actions weren't yet "resulting in sustained recovery", and by mid-afternoon it was reporting improved stability but gave no time for full recovery. CNBC reported that Microsoft will publish a full report once the outage is mitigated, and we'll update this page when it does.

As of Friday afternoon, Perth time, Microsoft said it had seen no sign of an attack. Its updates said it wasn't aware of any malicious activity, and executive vice president Charles Lamanna said on X there was, for now, no indication of "malicious or cyber activity". Minister Burke told reporters Microsoft believed it was "in some ways similar" to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, "where there is an update that has gone awry", CNN reported.

Is it you, or is it Microsoft?

Before anyone resets a password or reinstalls Office, check Microsoft first:

  1. The Microsoft 365 admin center, under Health, then Service health. It lists incidents that affect your own organisation, with Microsoft's updates. Global admins can see it, and so can people with the Service Support admin or Helpdesk admin role.
  2. Microsoft's public status page at status.cloud.microsoft. Microsoft's updates point there "if the admin center is not available to you". Even that page stopped loading for a while during this outage, TechRadar reported, so the Microsoft 365 Status account on X is worth checking too.

If the problem is listed there, nothing you change on your own computers will fix it. It can reach further than Outlook, too: the ABC reported Microsoft Authenticator down for some people, and the Adelaide owner couldn't get into his accounting software.

What to do while it's down

  1. Don't start fixing things that aren't broken. Resetting passwords, removing and re-adding accounts, or deleting the Outlook profile won't help, and deleting the profile throws away the copy of your mailbox that Outlook keeps on the computer.
  2. Work from Outlook's offline copy. Classic Outlook for Windows uses Cached Exchange Mode by default, which keeps a copy of your mailbox (normally the last 12 months) on the computer. You can still read and search mail you already have, and look at your calendar, and anything you write waits in the Outbox until the service is back. That's classic Outlook; if your team uses the new Outlook or Outlook on the web, ask your IT provider what's available offline.
  3. Open files you've synced. OneDrive and SharePoint files marked "Always keep on this device" open without the cloud. Files that are only online won't.
  4. Tell customers another way. A line on your website, a voicemail message or a quick call to anyone expecting an urgent reply beats silence. If you take orders or bookings by email, say so on your website and give a phone number.
  5. Don't panic about lost email. When a mail server can't deliver, it keeps retrying, and the email standard says senders should keep trying for days. Mail sent to you during the outage should mostly arrive late rather than vanish. Anyone who got a bounce should resend.
  6. Hang up on helpful strangers. Scammers will try to use the outage: expect calls from "Microsoft support" and emails asking you to sign in again to "restore your mailbox". Microsoft's own advice is to hang up on anyone offering tech support you didn't ask for. Ignore the links, go to the status page yourself, and report scam calls to Scamwatch.
  7. Write down what it cost you: when it started and who couldn't work. Microsoft's service level agreement for Microsoft 365 promises a level of uptime and offers service credits when it falls short, and service credits have to be claimed, usually by your admin or the Microsoft partner you buy through.

Microsoft says users may see a gradual recovery as their apps reconnect, so expect mail to trickle back rather than arrive all at once.

What to fix once it's back

If you run on Microsoft 365, your email, chat, files, calendars and maybe your phones all sit with one company, so when it goes down everything stops at once. You can't stop that. You can make the next one cheaper:

  • Have a way to talk that isn't Microsoft: staff mobiles and your key customer and supplier numbers, somewhere you can reach when Outlook and Teams are both down. A group text beats a dead Teams channel.
  • Make sure at least two people, or your IT provider, can open the admin center's Service health page. The Service Support admin role is enough, so you don't need more Global admins to do it.
  • Set a few critical folders to "Always keep on this device", so the price list or the job sheet is still there during an outage.
  • Back up Microsoft 365 with a separate service. Microsoft's retention features aren't a backup, and a backup held outside Microsoft lets you pull out an important file or email when Microsoft can't. Our guide to immutable backups covers what to look for.
  • Decide who checks the status page and who rings the customers who matter most, before you need to.

Where Geidi fits

When Microsoft goes down, the worst place to be is on hold with nobody who knows your setup. Our managed IT support includes a 7-day service desk with unlimited incident and onsite support, so on a day like Friday your team has someone to call instead of guessing. If Friday showed you a gap, talk to us about closing it before the next one.

Sources

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