Microsoft Says There Is No Evidence of A Cyberattack

Microsoft reported on Friday that it has not identified any evidence of malicious activity related to the global outage of its Outlook email service. The outage also affects other company products, such as the Teams communication platform and the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.

“To date, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat the matter with urgency and priority until its complete resolution,” the company said in a statement.

Outlook began experiencing instability on Thursday. According to the DownDetector website, outage reports peaked at 3 PM. By late evening, users were still having difficulty accessing the platform. Other company services, such as Teams, also experienced instability.

On X, formerly Twitter, a company profile confirmed the existence of problems with the service. “While we are working to mitigate the impact, we can confirm that the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region,” the company profile posted.

We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026

On Thursday, the company also stated that the measures taken to resolve the global Outlook outage were not working “as expected” and that it was seeking alternatives to restore services. The outage, which had already lasted several hours, affected users in 74 countries and territories, in addition to compromising the operation of other company platforms, such as the Teams messaging application and the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.

The company attributed the problem to a “high load” on its infrastructure, which caused connectivity errors in different regions. Users from various sectors, including government agencies, reported difficulties accessing the email service and maintaining communication.

“We monitored the status of the changes applied to improve functionality and confirmed that they are not working as expected,” Microsoft wrote on the social network X.

“We are identifying alternative courses of action that can be implemented to increase capacity in the face of persistent imbalances in traffic management,” the company added, without specifying when it expected to fully restore services.

Global reach

According to Downdetector, a platform that monitors outages in online services, the outage became global in less than an hour, affecting 74 countries and territories.

A map released by the platform on X showed reports of problems across the American continent, as well as regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that its “ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage.”

“This also affects all New Zealand embassies, consulates and representative offices worldwide,” the agency added.

Recovery attempts

Initially, Microsoft reported that it was investigating reports of outages in the Americas. Later, it confirmed that “the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”

Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service, which brings together applications such as Outlook and Teams.

“We have identified that part of the infrastructure is experiencing high load in several regions, which is possibly contributing to connectivity issues,” the company said in a publication on X.

“We are intensively investigating all alternatives to reduce the impact,” he added.

Among the measures adopted were the suspension of deployments, the redirection of traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and the restart of the affected servers.

Downdetector recorded a sharp drop, around 4:50 AM GMT, in the number of user reports of outages in Washington and Hong Kong. Even so, thousands of people continued to report problems with Teams and Copilot.

In a statement released shortly after 11 PM GMT, Microsoft said it was observing “limited recovery” as it attempted to redirect user traffic away from the affected servers.

“As capacity is restored, users can expect a gradual recovery,” the company added.