Tech giant Microsoft’s efforts to restore its services, which went down globally, have hit a dead end. The company acknowledged that the corrective measures taken so far have not yielded the expected results, leaving several key productivity services still experiencing severe disruptions.

In its latest update on Friday (November 13, 2026), Microsoft revealed that a number of servers that had been brought back online actually became unresponsive again when they experienced a surge in data traffic. As a result, the company was forced to brainstorm new strategies to expand network capacity.

“We have been monitoring the status of the changes implemented to improve service reliability and have confirmed that the results have not met expectations,” Microsoft management wrote via its official account on the X platform.

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The systemic outage, which began on Friday, has had a widespread impact on the company’s work ecosystem worldwide. Microsoft confirmed that the list of services still experiencing disruptions includes:

  • Microsoft Outlook & Exchange Online: Users are having difficulty loading their inboxes and are unable to send or receive emails.
  • Microsoft Teams & SharePoint Online: Virtual meetings and document collaboration were disrupted.
  • Copilot AI & Microsoft 365: Artificial intelligence (AI) assistant features and office applications experienced connectivity issues.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service reportedly continued to operate normally.

The Root Cause Behind the Microsoft Server Outage

Based on preliminary investigations, the root cause of this outage is believed to stem from a failure in the automated health checks component. The component responsible for monitoring the servers’ operational status malfunctioned, forcing a number of servers to automatically disconnect (go offline), according to Mashable, citing an update from Microsoft’s official X account.

The situation was exacerbated by infrastructure loads that were significantly heavier than usual across various regions, triggering a global domino effect of connection disruptions. At the peak of the outage, the Downdetector tracking site even recorded nearly 130,000 reports of issues for the Outlook service alone.

Microsoft initially attempted to bypass the problematic component while redirecting data traffic to alternative routes. However, as the servers continued to freeze under heavy traffic, the company is now limiting the types of data traffic entering certain locations while continuing to investigate the root cause of the system failure.