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Disruptions to the company’s email, messaging and other products lasted about 36 hours, hampering companies and services around the world.

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Published Nov. 13, 2026Updated Nov. 14, 2026, 8:15 a.m. ET

Microsoft said early Saturday that it had fully restored its services after a global outage disrupted them for a day and a half, hampering communications and work at schools, government agencies and offices around the world.

The problems began on Thursday and cascaded around the world. The company, based in Redmond, Wash., gradually restored service through Friday until declaring an end to one of its most extensive outages of recent times in an update on Saturday around 1 a.m. Eastern time.

Here’s what to know.

Outages started disrupting Microsoft tools and apps around noon Eastern time on Thursday and quickly spread to more than 70 countries and territories, affecting millions of users, according to Downdetector, an outage-tracking site.

Some of Microsoft’s most popular products, including the email manager Outlook, the workplace messaging and video calling app Teams and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, stopped working.

Microsoft said in a statement on Friday that “for now, we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.” It added that the problem was “a technical issue not related to cyber or A.I.” agents.

The company said it had no indication that a Federal Aviation Administration ground stop issued late Friday afternoon, which has affected air travel nationwide, was related to the outage.

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Extracted and lightly reformatted for readability. · Source: pt