Microsoft 365 outage: what is down and what WordPress site owners should check

As of 10:01 UTC on 13 November 2026, Microsoft lists its Microsoft 365 outage as a service degradation, with recovery "in phases" and capacity "not yet fully returned to baseline". The trouble started around 17:50 UTC on 12 November with Exchange Online mailbox access and spread to Outlook, Teams calendar features, Copilot and other services. Microsoft has extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so delayed messages are kept, and reports no evidence of malicious activity.

Last updated: 13 November 2026, 10:39 UTC. I will update this post when Microsoft publishes its Post-Incident Report.

What is down in the Microsoft 365 outage?

Microsoft's public notice on its service health status page (opens in a new tab) is titled "Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services". It says the features hit are the ones "that interact with Exchange Online and email services", and that parts of those services that do not depend on Exchange Online still work.

The main items in Microsoft's list, as of its 10:01 UTC update:

• Exchange Online: users may be unable to reach their mailbox in Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync or REST-based connections, "and email delivery may be delayed".
• Microsoft Graph: requests that touch Exchange Online data, such as mail, calendar and contacts, may time out.
• Teams: calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages are not affected. Calendar scheduling, invites and other features that depend on Exchange Online fail.
• SharePoint Online: opening files stored in SharePoint works. Sharing with people outside the organisation may fail.
• Also listed: Microsoft 365 Copilot, the admin center, Defender XDR, Defender for Office 365, Purview, Intune, Planner, To Do, Power BI exports, Universal Print and some Windows 365 Cloud PCs.

Consumer accounts are affected too. The consumer section of the same page lists Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web. Azure shows no issues.

Admins can follow the incidents in the Microsoft 365 admin center as MO1550821 (the wider incident) and EX1550543 (Exchange Online), the IDs SecurityWeek (opens in a new tab) and BleepingComputer (opens in a new tab) report. Microsoft posts the details on the public page as well, because admins "may be unable to access the admin center".

Timeline in UTC

Times below are converted from US Eastern time (UTC-5) where the outlets reported them that way.

• 12 November, about 17:50: Microsoft says it is "investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online", according to NBC News (opens in a new tab). Users in the Americas are hit first; Microsoft later says any region can be affected.
• 12 November, afternoon and evening: Microsoft reports servers failing automated health checks, tests a different health-check method and restarts affected servers. By 23:57, BleepingComputer reports Microsoft seeing "limited recovery".
• 13 November, by 02:00: Microsoft is rolling back a recent network configuration change, SecurityWeek reports.
• 13 November, 04:36: "partial recovery" in regions with changes applied, but not "sustained recovery" (NBC News).
• 13 November, about 07:30: "positive results for server stability" after a patch to an authentication and routing configuration component (NBC News).
• 13 November, 10:01: the latest notice on the status page, quoted above. Microsoft promised the next update by 11:00 UTC.

What has Microsoft said about the cause?

No root cause yet. Microsoft has described what happened on the servers: a large number became "unexpectedly unavailable", traffic had not increased overall, health checks failed, and a core process on the affected servers was overwhelmed, which removed more capacity. The configuration rollback and the patch are recovery steps; Microsoft has not said either caused the outage.

The status page says Microsoft will publish "a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete".

How does a Microsoft 365 outage affect a WordPress site?

WordPress sites do not run on Microsoft 365, so your pages keep loading. The risk sits in the jobs your site hands to Microsoft:

• Email your site sends through Microsoft 365. If an SMTP plugin sends through smtp.office365.com or through Microsoft's Graph API, contact-form notifications, WooCommerce order emails and password resets depend on Exchange Online.
• Email your site sends to a Microsoft 365 mailbox. If your business mailbox is on Exchange Online, form notifications and new-order alerts sent by any provider may arrive late, because Microsoft says delivery may be delayed.
• Sign in with Microsoft. Microsoft's notice does not list Microsoft Entra ID sign-in among the affected services as of 10:01 UTC. Test it anyway if your site or its admin depends on it.
• Teams and Outlook integrations. Anything that calls Microsoft Graph for mail, calendar or contacts may time out. Booking plugins that write to Outlook calendars through Graph fall into this group.
• Embedded SharePoint or OneDrive files. Microsoft says direct SharePoint file access works, so embedded documents should still open.

How to check whether your site is affected right now

Five checks, in this order:

1. Read the status page. Check status.cloud.microsoft (opens in a new tab) for the latest notice and its time.
2. Open your SMTP plugin's log. Look for failed sends since 17:50 UTC on 12 November. Note which emails failed: order, form, password reset.
3. Send a test email from the plugin's test screen to a mailbox outside Microsoft 365, such as a Gmail address. If that fails, sending is broken. If it works, the delay is more likely on the receiving side.
4. Check the queue on your mail server. If your server relays mail rather than sending straight from WordPress, mailq or postqueue -p (Postfix) lists deferred messages. Many shared hosts do not give you this.
5. Look at your form entries and orders in WordPress. If your form plugin stores entries in the database, enquiries are saved there even when the notification email never arrived.

What to do during the outage

Do not change your DNS or MX records in a hurry. A rushed MX change can send mail to a server that is not set up to accept it, and DNS caching means the change cannot be undone quickly. Microsoft has already extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to keep delayed messages.

Let retries do their work. Mail servers that get a temporary failure try again later, so most delayed mail arrives without anyone touching it. WordPress itself does not queue email by default, though: if wp_mail() cannot hand a message to Microsoft's SMTP server, that message fails. Some SMTP plugins can resend a failed message from their log.

Switch to a backup sender only if one is already set up and tested, for example a transactional email service with SPF and DKIM for your domain in place. A sender set up in a hurry, without those records, is likely to land in spam or be rejected.

Hold off on newsletters and bulk sends until Microsoft reports full recovery.

What to do after Microsoft fixes it

Once the status page shows the incident resolved:

• Confirm queued mail went out. Check the SMTP plugin's log and any server queue again. Send one fresh test.
• Resend order emails that failed. In WooCommerce, open each affected order and use the order action "Send order details to customer", as described in the WooCommerce order guide (opens in a new tab). Check the new-order emails your staff rely on, too.
• Read bounce messages. A bounce that arrived during the outage tells you exactly which message was refused and why.
• Reply to enquiries from the gap. Compare stored form entries with the notifications that reached your inbox.

To trace an order email from the order to the inbox, see how to trace WooCommerce order emails that are not sending. To catch failures like this before customers tell you, WordPress uptime monitoring covers checks beyond the home page. If you would rather someone else watched the email path, updates and backups, that is part of my WordPress maintenance plans.