Microsoft is experiencing a global outage this morning, disrupting access to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot, with businesses across Australia affected as they start their working day.
The disruption is affecting several of Microsoft’s core business services, threatening to leave employees unable to access emails, calendars, collaboration tools and other essential workplace systems.
Microsoft has confirmed that customers in multiple regions may be unable to connect to Exchange Online, the cloud-based email platform underpinning Outlook for business and enterprise Microsoft 365 customers.
The company is tracking the incident under reference EX1550543, with a second advisory, MO1550821, confirming potential disruptions to Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR.
Microsoft said the second incident began at 1.26pm ET (5.26am AEDT).
Users have reported difficulties accessing mailboxes across Outlook’s web, desktop and mobile applications, as well as through third-party email clients. Calendar functionality and Microsoft 365 logins have also been affected.
Even the tools IT administrators rely on to monitor the situation have reportedly been unreliable, with some unable to access the Microsoft 365 admin centre and Microsoft’s own status pages struggling to load.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft posted on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
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
The company initially attributed the disruption to “elevated load across multiple regions” across part of its infrastructure.
However, Microsoft later clarified that the issue was not caused by a surge in demand, but by a number of servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable, forcing the remaining infrastructure to carry the additional traffic.
Its latest update says it is testing a configuration change intended to address an issue causing servers to fail automated health checks and drop out of service.
Microsoft’s warning that users in any region could be affected puts Australian businesses in the firing line, particularly retailers, agencies, resellers and distributors relying on Microsoft’s platforms to manage communications, sales and day-to-day operations.
The outage is another significant disruption for the technology giant this year.
On 22 January, Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services experienced a widespread outage lasting several hours before Microsoft eventually declared the issue resolved.
The latest incident again highlights the dependence of global businesses on a handful of major cloud platforms, with disruptions to a single provider capable of affecting thousands of organisations simultaneously.
