Status as at 8:57 am Brisbane time, Friday 13 November: Microsoft reports the incident is still open at service degradation, with no end time given, but with the first signs of recovery. Its latest update says: "We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions." It adds that "as capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service." Microsoft's next update is due at 10:00 am Brisbane time. (Microsoft's service health notice to tenant administrators, incident EX1550543; the public status page is status.cloud.microsoft.)
What Microsoft has said
The incident began at 16:17 UTC on Thursday 12 November, which is 2:17 am on Friday 13 November in Brisbane. Microsoft's title for it is "Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods", and it lists the affected connection methods as Outlook on the web, the Messaging API used by desktop Outlook, Exchange ActiveSync used by phone mail apps, and the REST API. In plain words: every usual way into a mailbox can be affected, so a phone or browser that will not connect is not a sign that your own setup is at fault. (Microsoft's service health notice to tenant administrators, incident EX1550543; status.cloud.microsoft.)
Microsoft said on its status account early in the incident that it was "testing a configuration change to address a problem that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable" and had "initiated a restart of all affected servers" (Microsoft 365 Status on X). It later said it had "validated an alternative service health check method, which allowed a subset of affected servers to successfully return to service" and was applying that change more broadly (Microsoft 365 Status on X). Microsoft also said it had begun redistributing connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure and that the issue "may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region" (KSAT, 12 November 2026).
The wider effects on Teams, SharePoint and other services are tracked by Microsoft as a separate connectivity advisory, MO1550821. This page stays centred on email, which is where most of the impact is.
How to tell it is the outage and not you
- Outlook on your computer keeps asking for your password, or sits on "trying to connect".
- The Outlook app on your phone, or Outlook in a browser, will not load your mailbox either.
- Teams or SharePoint may also play up, since Microsoft is tracking knock-on effects on its other services.
- Everything else works: websites, your phone system, and services that are not Microsoft's.
If that is your picture, it is the outage. Do not reset your password, and do not reinstall or remove anything because of it. Your password is not the problem; the mailbox servers are, and a reset now only adds a thing to undo later.
What to do in the meantime
- Phone calls and non-Microsoft services still work. If a message is urgent, ring the person.
- Keep a local copy of anything you need today. If a document is open in a desktop app, save it to your computer as well.
- Do not keep retrying sign-in every minute. It does not speed anything up, and it is how people end up locking themselves out.
- When mail comes back, expect a backlog: a sending mail server normally holds a message it cannot deliver and retries for hours, so mail sent to you during the outage tends to arrive late rather than disappear.
How to check for yourself
Microsoft's public page is status.cloud.microsoft, and its Microsoft 365 Status account on X posts the same updates. If you administer your own Microsoft 365 tenant, the Service health page in the Microsoft 365 admin centre carries the full notice under incident EX1550543, and the advisory for the other services under MO1550821. If we manage your tenant, you do not need to look: we are reading the same notice.
What we do during a Microsoft incident
A Microsoft outage is not something any provider can fix from outside Microsoft. What we do is watch Microsoft's incident updates as they come, tell clients who ask what the latest one says in plain words, and keep this page current. Once Microsoft gives the all-clear, we check that mail flow and sign-in have recovered for anyone who reports a problem, because the last stage of an outage like this is uneven and a mailbox can lag behind the rest.
If you are not sure whether what you are seeing is the outage, ring the helpdesk on 1300 720 790. That is what it is there for, on a day like this as much as any other.