Microsoft Outage: Major Disruption Hits Outlook and Teams, Potentially Affecting Email Services in Hong Kong

Microsoft’s email service, Outlook, suffered a massive, sudden system outage, leaving tens of thousands of users worldwide unable to send or receive emails properly. The workplace collaboration software Microsoft Teams was also affected.

The disruption began around 1:00 p.m. EST on November 12 (2:00 a.m. HKT on November 13). According to monitoring data from the network outage tracking website Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users globally submitted reports of Outlook being down during the initial stages of the incident. Thousands of other users also reported experiencing connectivity issues when accessing Microsoft Teams. By 3:00 p.m. EST (4:00 a.m. HKT on November 13), global outage reports for Outlook had declined to approximately 60,000. On November 12, 2026, Microsoft reported a large-scale system failure preventing users from accessing Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft services. (Getty)

As Asia entered its morning work hours, service disruptions also began emerging in Singapore. By approximately 6:40 a.m. on November 13, Downdetector recorded 195 outage reports for Microsoft Outlook in Singapore—a sharp increase from the 75 reports logged an hour earlier. Local outage reports for the cloud subscription suite Microsoft 365 reached 94.

In response to the sudden incident, Microsoft initially stated that it was investigating reports of service interruptions in the Americas. However, the company later updated its statement, confirming that the connectivity issue could impact Microsoft 365 users in any region.

Explaining the cause of the outage on the social media platform X, Microsoft noted that portions of its infrastructure across multiple regions were experiencing high load, which was likely the primary trigger for the connection errors. Microsoft emphasized that it was working at full capacity to implement all viable mitigation measures, having paused all new system deployments, rerouted excess traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and restarted relevant servers to restore services as quickly as possible.