Microsoft's latest outage hit Outlook and Copilot — what it means for your email Jared Blikre Fri, November 13, 2026 at 2:01 PM EST 3 min read MSFT +0.12% OPAI.PVT ANTH.PVT Trade MSFT on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Millions of office workers got an unplanned break from email Thursday. Their bosses' favorite new AI tool got one too.
A Microsoft (MSFT) outage that began midday Thursday knocked out Outlook and other workplace apps worldwide, with Downdetector logging reports from 74 countries within about an hour. By Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress."
The damage reached Microsoft's AI. Copilot couldn't access users' email, files, or calendars, and the Microsoft connectors for OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's (ANTH.PVT) Claude broke too.
Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 apps.
Your email isn't lost. Microsoft stretched its email timeout to 48 hours, so messages sent to you keep trying to deliver instead of bouncing back.
There isn't much to fix on your end. Resetting your password or reinstalling Outlook won't help, though desktop Outlook may still show mail it already downloaded.
If your company pays for Microsoft 365, it may be owed money. Microsoft promises 99.9% uptime, about 43 minutes of downtime a month, with credits of 25% to 100% of the monthly fee when it falls short. Your IT department has to file the claim.
Microsoft is hard to replace, which is usually good news for its shareholders. Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, whose fund owns Microsoft stock, said at Yahoo Finance Invest on Thursday that Microsoft is "the gateway to how people interact with the basic workflows of a desk worker," which makes it "a much more difficult position to dislodge."
Microsoft has blamed its own changes or maintenance for Microsoft 365 disruptions in at least six months this year, from a nearly 10-hour outage in January to a spam-filter update that bounced real email earlier this month.
Australia's home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft believes it's dealing with "an update that has gone awry," much like the 2024 CrowdStrike meltdown.
Microsoft reached for the oldest fix in the help desk manual, saying Thursday it was "restarting affected servers to return them to service."
It didn't stick. Servers that came back went down again once traffic returned, and on Friday Microsoft was reversing a recent network change without confirming it was the cause.
The outage comes as Microsoft trims its workforce while spending heavily on AI. It offered buyouts to about 60,000 employees in October, and those who accept leave Dec. 31. CEO Satya Nadella said last year that AI writes "maybe 20%, 30%" of Microsoft's code.
There's no evidence either played a role. In a statement to Yahoo Finance, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said the company regrets "the impact these outages had on those who depend on us" and that "our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward." He didn't address questions about staffing or AI tools.
Chris Versace, chief investment officer at Tematica Research, put the lesson simply: "The outage and how it hobbled many businesses and other enterprises is a reminder about the need for redundancies."
Internal AI tools helped analyze interview transcripts, research, and draft this post. Humans reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.
