Microsoft has announced on
After about 20 hours of passion for millions of usersThe down which affected Outlook, Microsoft 365, Copilot and other branded services Microsoft causing inconvenience to institutional sites and companies, is finally returning. The servers, in fact, are returning to work regularly, as announced on X – the late Twitter – by the US IT giant, with a post published at 2.32pm Italian time today, Friday 13 November 2026. For now the improvements are patchy and mainly concentrated in North America and a large part ofEuropewith “encouraging signs of recovery also in the Asia-Pacific area”, highlights the company founded by Bill Gates. The rest of the world should follow suit asinfrastructure is completely restored to full operation.
Despite the situation improving significantly, Microsoft warns that «some users may still experience problems Intermittent access issues or delays in the delivery of e-mailwhile mitigation activities continue on the remaining affected infrastructure.” The collapse of reports on Downdetector.it also certifies that the disservice is decreasing, dropping to a few hundred after 3pm against the thousands this morning. The down began around 6.30pm on Thursday 12 November and, after a first significant drop recorded around 7.30pm yesterday, the reports remained relatively stable throughout the evening and night.
Around 04:00 Italian time Microsoft announced difficulty in restoring services, due to “applied changes” unable to mitigate the problem, a scenario that paved the way for the IT chaos this morning. When the working day began in offices, schools and companies, there was indeed a real explosion of reports due to inefficiencies, including failed access, error messages and inability to access e-mail, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence agent. The peak was reached around 08:47-48 for both Outlook and the Microsoft 365 software suite.
As we told you in this article, Microsoft’s downturn has also triggered significant problems for communications of transport and institutions. Eurocontrolthe European agency responsible for coordinating air traffic, has for example requested telephone and non-telematic contacts until the outage is resolved. Also blocked the emails of European Court of Human Rights, DHL Freight and the UK Health Service (NHS), among others. Fortunately, sent and received messages should not be lost, but remain in place tail in a window between 24 and 72 hours, as we explained here.
Microsoft engineers are working hard to completely rectify the situation, which, according to what was communicated about Charles Lamannawas not triggered by a hacker attackbut rather from the “unexpected unavailability of some servers”, which consequently caused others to overload. The reason for this unavailabilityhowever, has not been clarified. «Our goal – explained Microsoft – remains that of stabilize restored infrastructure, complete mitigation activities in the remaining affected areas, and reduce queues and delayed email backlogs, as we validate service consistency across different connection methods.” «A more complete update – adds the company – is available at address MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.»
Although the situation is clearly improving, as demonstrated by the tests we have personally performed, a «performance degradation on Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) and on Microsoft products for private users.» It is not currently possible to say when services will be fully restored for all users.
