OUTLOOK AND OTHER Microsoft services are down for users around the world this morning, as the company works to resolve an outage that began late on Thursday.

The disruption has affected access to email, alongside parts of Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services.

A map posted by Downdetector showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

In updates on X, Microsoft said servers brought back online could become unresponsive again once they started receiving traffic.

“The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic; we’re analyzing diagnostic data to determine what’s triggering the behavior,” it said.

We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/pYdahqxDv3 if the admin center is not available to you.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026

The company said it was adjusting how traffic moves through its systems and temporarily blocking some traffic to help stabilise services.

It reported partial recovery in some regions, but said work to restore affected infrastructure was continuing.

In a more recent update, Microsoft said: “We’re continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity.”

The disruption has also affected public services overseas.

New Zealand’s immigration authority said it had paused visa processing and that customers could not currently apply through its enhanced online platform.

“Immigration New Zealand has paused the processing of all visa applications until further notice because of the global Microsoft outage,” it said.

Additional reporting from AFP