Recovery underway after major Microsoft outage
Recovery underway after major Microsoft outage
Megan Southall Fri, November 13, 2026 at 10:05 PM UTC
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DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – A massive global outage took Microsoft by storm Thursday, Nov. 12, with several of Microsoft’s platforms being impacted, including email services provided through Microsoft Outlook.
According to Micah Cooper, the associate vice president of technology at Cedarville University, an outage like this could cripple a business.
“If this happens more often, it can disrupt the way we do business here in the United States,” said Cooper. “So much business is done via email. Especially official business is over email. When it’s down, we feel it.”
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This raises the question of whether major tech companies, such as Microsoft and Google, are truly “too big to fail.” However, Cooper believes the cause of the outage was likely human error.
“They’re human, and sometimes they make a mistake,” said Cooper. “They make assumptions, something gets pushed, and it causes problems.”
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As of 3 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 13, Down Detector showed a little less than 37,000 services still affected across 72 countries, with a red banner suggesting Outlook, Teams, and Copilot are the platforms with the most problems reported.
2 NEWS reached out to Microsoft for an update and received a response from a spokesperson reading in part: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents… We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.”
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For business owners or anyone else who may have felt helpless during the outage, Cooper suggests always having a backup plan.
“Businesses should say, ‘How do we deliver on our promise if this goes down? What are all our alternative providers and technologies to do what we need?’” said Cooper.
According to Microsoft, a full report will be released once the company has completely reviewed the incident.
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Source: “AOL Money”
