Is Outlook down....again?

Yes—a widespread Microsoft service outage affected Outlook sign-in and mailbox access, along with Microsoft 365, Teams, and related services, on November 12–13, 2026; recovery may be gradual by region.^1^ ^2^

What to do

1. Check Microsoft’s Service Health Status site.
2. Expand Microsoft consumer products if necessary and check Outlook.com and the other affected services.
3. If the status is not green, wait for Microsoft to restore the service and retry periodically. Microsoft specifically recommends waiting rather than changing account settings while an outage is active.^3^
4. Avoid repeatedly resetting your password during the incident; a service outage is not resolved by changing local browser or account settings.

If the status is green but sign-in still fails

For a personal Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live, or MSN account, use Microsoft’s sign-in troubleshooter from the Outlook.com sign-in guidance.^4^

If the account is blocked or requests identity verification, complete that account-recovery process. If the account works elsewhere but Outlook.com remains inaccessible after service recovery, use the Microsoft account sign-in helper; Outlook.com support cannot manually assist with sign-in problems.^5^

For a work or school account, contact the organization’s Microsoft 365 administrator after the public incident clears. The administrator can check tenant-specific service health and open a Microsoft support request if the problem remains.

References

1. Microsoft’s Outlook email hit by new outage - TechCrunch
2. Microsoft platforms including Outlook suffer widespread outages
3. How to sign in to Hotmail | Microsoft Support
4. How to sign in to Outlook.com | Microsoft Support
5. How to get support for Outlook.com | Microsoft Support