The outage began on Thursday and quickly became global. The Guardian reported that reports began rising at about 6pm GMT on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 reports to DownDetector at the time, and other reporting said the disruption spread to 74 countries and territories within about an hour. It affected Microsoft 365 services including Outlook email, Teams, Copilot and related workplace tools, and was also reported to cause problems for Microsoft 365 connectors used by services such as ChatGPT and Claude. Millions of people were left unable to access emails or Teams chats and meetings on Thursday night and Friday morning.
On duration and repair, the evidence aligns with the claim. The Guardian stated that the outage had lasted for nearly 16 hours at the time of reporting and that Microsoft was still working to bring services back online. It quoted Microsoft at 9.10am on Friday as saying it was seeing early signs of stabilisation, but that service capacity had not yet returned to normal levels and health remained variable as traffic was carefully reintroduced. BBC News described the same pattern over a long period, summarising Microsoft updates that moved from returning a portion of affected servers to incremental improvement, while The Next Web said the incident had passed 12 hours with no sustained fix.
The situation was serious in practical terms, not only in length. The Guardian reported widespread and serious disruption for the NHS in England, with remote therapy sessions disrupted, pharmacies having problems communicating with GP surgeries, and some UK police forces urging people to phone rather than report crimes online. BBC News reported that the GMB union described a serious impact across ambulance and NHS trusts, with 111 and 999 staff unable to refer patient details in the normal way, although emergency and life-threatening callouts appeared unaffected. Schools, courts, councils, government agencies, airlines and financial firms were also among those reporting email and communications problems.
There were signs of partial progress, but they do not contradict the claim that the outage was still not fixed. The Guardian said Teams meetings and chats had returned to service by Friday morning and that most problems had been narrowed to Exchange, the email service behind Outlook. BBC News said recovery actions had been completed across portions of affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region and that mailbox access was improving there, with the fix being extended to other regions. However, both BBC News and CNN emphasised that users could still experience intermittent issues and that Microsoft had not yet observed sustained recovery, which is consistent with services remaining impaired rather than restored.
The cause reported in the coverage does not change the verdict on duration or repair. The Guardian said the problem appeared to involve a configuration update that overloaded some servers, and that Microsoft said there was no indication of a cyberattack. The Next Web and CNN also reported Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna as confirming there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity. Taken together, current reporting from 13 November 2026 supports the substance of the post: the outage had passed the 15-hour mark and, at the time of reporting, was still not fully fixed.
