An ongoing outage has taken down a huge array of Microsoft-owned services, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Copilot, Teams and Xbox Live. Users began reporting problems with a breadth of Microsoft products and services last night, which Microsoft has since blamed on “elevated load across multiple regions.”
Both The Verge and Gizmodo (and pretty much every tech-related website in existence) reported the Microsoft outages yesterday evening, and Insider Gaming confirmed this morning that, yup, everything is still broken. This reportedly includes Xbox Live services, although the Xbox Status page currently states that everything is fine and dandy. That’s in stark contrast to Down Detector’s reports, however, which currently state that every Microsoft service from Copilot to OneDrive is having a rough start to the day, and includes Xbox Network. According to the BBC’s reporting, the outage is so severe that it’s affecting several public British services, including hospitals and airports. Happy Friday the 13th, by the way!
We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We’re providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026
So, what the hell is going on? Microsoft 365 Status on X has blamed it on “elevated load,” which is a fancy way of saying that their servers are at capacity. But why are they at capacity? Good question. Every report I’ve read so far states that Microsoft hasn’t been particularly forthcoming regarding the details, so your guess is as good as mine, but the company is being very clear it’s not due to an external attack.
On the plus side, Microsoft 365 Status’ latest report states that Microsoft is “seeing incremental improvement in several workloads.” However, the same report also states that “service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.” Microsoft also explained that its attempted fixes are “not taking as expected.”
Ultimately, this is a slightly terrifying reminder that vast numbers of public services are almost entirely dependent on Microsoft’s servers functioning. I’m not sure how much the British government is paying for those Microsoft services, but in light of this debacle, I’d wager the answer is “too much.”