Microsoft 365 Down: Outlook and Teams Outage — Is It Your Machine or Microsoft's?

Yes, Microsoft 365 Is Down — It's Not Your Machine

On 12 November 2026, Microsoft confirmed a widespread outage hitting Outlook, Teams and Copilot, with users reporting connectivity problems worldwide. If your email stopped working yesterday and your colleagues saw the same thing, this is almost certainly Microsoft's problem, not yours.

We're writing this the morning after because every big outage triggers a wave of "my email is broken" calls to us — and most of those machines are completely fine. Some aren't, and that's the tricky part. So this post is a two-minute triage: how to tell a Microsoft outage from a local fault, what to do while you wait, and what to check when the outage ends but your machine still won't connect.

The Two-Minute Triage: Outage or Your Machine?

Three checks. None of them change anything on your machine, so they're safe to do while Microsoft works on the fix.

1. Check the status page. Microsoft runs its own service status page at status.cloud.microsoft, and business admins get the fuller version in the Microsoft 365 admin centre under Service health. If there are red incident markers across Exchange Online or Teams, that's your answer — it's not your machine. Personal accounts see a consumer-facing version of the same page; business accounts see more detail.

2. Try another device. Open Outlook or Teams on your phone. If it works there, your Microsoft account and Microsoft's servers are fine — the problem lives on the computer.

3. Try another network. Tether the laptop to your phone's hotspot. If it connects happily over mobile data, suspect your router or your ISP, not Microsoft and not the laptop.

All three together take about two minutes, and between them they answer the only question that matters right now: whose fault is it?

What NOT to do during an outage

This is the part we need you to read twice:

• Don't uninstall Office.
• Don't delete and recreate your email account.
• Don't run "repair" tools you found on a forum.

In our workshop experience, most big outages produce a second wave of machines damaged not by the outage but by their owners — machines that were perfectly fine get broken in the twenty minutes between "email stops" and "status page loads". If the triage says it's Microsoft, the correct amount of fixing to do on your machine is none.

It's the Outage. Now What?

Do nothing to the machine. Microsoft's engineers fix their side; there is nothing to patch, reinstall or reset locally. That's genuinely the whole answer.

Beyond that:

• Try Outlook on the web at outlook.office.com. Sometimes the web version survives when the desktop app doesn't, and vice versa — worth trying both before you write the afternoon off.
• If Teams calls are down, a phone hotspot and a personal video service will get you through a meeting. But don't move business data onto personal accounts to "keep working" — that's a data-protection headache that outlasts the outage by months.
• Watch the status page rather than retrying every thirty seconds. Repeated failed sign-ins can trip Microsoft's account security and add a second problem on top of the outage — now you've got two things to fix instead of one.
• For small businesses: this is a good moment to ask whether you have an outage plan. Who tells staff? What's the fallback? Who's allowed to make changes? If you don't have an IT provider who can answer that question today, that's worth fixing before the next one — and this week's news about SCKit and the N-able zero-day is a reminder that "who do we call" cuts both ways.

The Outage Is Over — But Your Machine Still Won't Connect

This is the part nobody else covers. Microsoft says "resolved", your colleagues are back online, and your Outlook is still sulking. Here's the order of operations:

1. Give it an hour or two. After a big outage, Microsoft's servers come back in stages and clients reconnect gradually. A lagging machine isn't necessarily a broken one.
2. Restart properly. Full shutdown, not sleep. In our workshop experience, a clean restart re-establishes the sign-in tokens Outlook and Teams rely on, and it fixes a surprising number of "still broken" machines on its own.
3. Check for a half-applied update. If Windows or Office updates got interrupted during the outage window, a pending or failed update is a common reason one machine stays broken after the rest recover. This is where a Windows reinstall or repair sometimes becomes the honest answer.
4. Sign out and back in to the Microsoft account in the affected app. That refreshes credentials without touching your data or settings.

And the line that matters: if one machine is still dead a day after the outage cleared while every other device in the house or office is fine, you've moved from "outage" to "local fault". That's our department.

When It Really Is Your Machine: The Usual Suspects

Three or four faults reliably mimic an outage. Here's how to spot them — we'll leave the fixing to ourselves, because these are exactly the jobs where a wrong move costs you your email history.

Corrupted Outlook profile. The classic symptom: one machine stuck on "Trying to connect" or "Need password" while every other device on the same account works fine. The fix involves rebuilding the profile and re-syncing the mailbox — fiddly, and easy to make worse if you guess.

A Windows update gone wrong. If the trouble started around a Patch Tuesday or a feature update rather than at the exact moment of the outage, suspect the update. As we wrote in our Windows 11 end-of-support post, machines limping along on old, fragile installs are the ones most likely to break around updates.

Network stack problems. If the hotspot test failed too, it's the machine's networking — Wi-Fi driver, DNS, or the Windows power plan putting the wireless card into a low-power state. That last one is something we see regularly in the workshop, and the November-onwards Wi-Fi complaint spike we notice every year makes it more likely, not less.

Security software or a leftover infection. Less common, but a machine that's been quietly compromised for weeks can break in ways that look like an outage. This week's SCKit news is a reminder that compromised machines are often compromised for a while before anyone notices — and a proper virus and spyware clean-up is the only way to know.

The pattern that ties it together: outage = everything, everyone, everywhere at once. Local fault = one machine, one account, or one network.

What We See in the Workshop After Every Big Outage

In our experience, most major Microsoft outages produce a second wave of work — and it isn't the outage itself. It's machines "fixed" by their owners during the panic: deleted profiles, removed accounts, half-run repairs, registry edits copied from forum posts written for entirely different versions of Office.

The honest advice: if the two-minute triage says it's Microsoft, wait. If it says it's your machine, stop at the diagnosis. Profile rebuilds, update rollbacks and network stack resets are exactly the jobs where one wrong click costs your email history — and email history is the thing you actually care about.

If you've already had a go and made it worse, don't feel bad. That's a fair chunk of our workload this week. Bring it in and we'll untangle it.

Fast Track: When You Can't Wait for Email

If your machine is still dead after the outage has cleared, our Fast Track repair gets it to the front of the queue — aimed at same-day turnaround, because a business without email is losing money by the hour.

We collect and deliver across Portsmouth for £10 each way, or you can drop the machine off at the workshop on Durham Street — we come to you, which matters when the machine in question is the one you work on. Students and NHS staff get our discount, and small businesses with several machines still down after the outage can call us about getting them all looked at in one visit.

We diagnose before we touch anything and quote before any work starts — so if it turns out to be a five-minute fix, that's what you pay for. Call us on 02392 733174 or check your collection area here.

Questions people ask