Microsoft outage updates: Outlook, Teams down for millions as UAE users report disruption

Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Online users in the UAE have started receiving emails again as services gradually recover following the widespread outage.

Some users are reporting that previously delayed messages are now arriving in their inboxes, suggesting that email delivery is beginning to resume.

However, Microsoft has yet to confirm full restoration, and intermittent delays may continue as the company works to clear email backlogs.

Microsoft says recovery is progressing across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America and sustained gains across much of Europe.

The company is also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue experiencing intermittent mailbox access problems or delayed email delivery.

Engineers are working to clear email backlogs and stabilise the remaining affected infrastructure. Microsoft has not confirmed full restoration.

Microsoft says it is expanding a technical patch across more of its infrastructure after seeing improvements in server stability.

The company said the patch targets an authentication and routing component linked to the disruption affecting Outlook, Exchange Online and other Microsoft 365 services.

Following positive results, engineers are extending the fix to additional infrastructure while monitoring service performance.

Microsoft has not yet confirmed full restoration.

Microsoft has provided further details about the technical problems behind the outage.

According to the company, a process responsible for establishing secure connections on affected servers became overwhelmed, preventing the servers from processing requests.

Microsoft has been applying fixes and restoring capacity gradually. It has said there is no indication that malicious activity caused the disruption.

The company has deployed fixes more broadly, but service performance remains inconsistent as traffic is gradually reintroduced to affected infrastructure.

Microsoft has yet to confirm full restoration or announce when all services will return to normal.

Microsoft restored access to Dynamics 365 Contact Center after a separate disruption left customer-service agents unable to handle voice and digital conversations.

According to Microsoft's service-health information reported by CX Today, the disruption lasted nearly eight hours, with access restored at 00.57 GMT on Friday (4.57am UAE).

The incident, tracked as CR1550885, involved connectivity failures affecting database infrastructure. It is separate from the wider Exchange Online outage, which remained unresolved at the time of the report.

The Microsoft outage has disrupted government and healthcare services in Australia, affecting agencies and organisations that rely on Outlook and Microsoft 365.

Reportedly affected services include Service NSW, state and territory government departments, and Queensland Health.

The disruption has also affected telehealth appointments, school operations and business communications, highlighting the wider consequences of the outage beyond email access.

Microsoft 365 users in the UAE are still having problems on Friday, with Outlook and email worst hit, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector.ae. Reports first spiked late Thursday night, reaching close to 300 at around 10.30pm before dropping back after midnight. A second, larger wave began from about 6am on Friday as people started their working day.

Complaints rose sharply and peaked at more than 550 reports just after 9am. Reports have since fallen but have not gone away: they stood at roughly 300 by late morning and are still above 200 into the afternoon, which suggests the problem is not yet fixed.

Of the problems reported, 42 per cent were with the Outlook app, 29 per cent with receiving messages and 18 per cent with logging in. The disruption has also spread to Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 apps.

Microsoft said the disruption was caused by “elevated load” on part of its infrastructure across multiple regions, which was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”. The company said it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact”.

Japan’s economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said the outage would undoubtedly have a “significant impact”. “Since this software is used by a vast number of people, we will closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it,” he told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Immigration New Zealand said it had paused the processing of all visa applications until further notice because of the outage.

According to reports, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, based on figures on Microsoft’s website, though the full scale of the outage is still unclear. Outage tracker Downdetector recorded about 140,000 reports of Outlook problems from users in 74 countries on Thursday evening, and the real number is likely far higher, since the site relies mainly on people reporting issues themselves.

Because Microsoft 365 is used by companies around the world, the disruption has also spilled over into other services. OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems linked to the outage, with the ChatGPT maker saying it was investigating an issue with its connections to Microsoft’s services that had stopped some tools from working as expected.

Microsoft said Thursday that it was not aware of any "malicious activity" behind the hours-long disruption of its Outlook services.

"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," Microsoft said.

Indian airlines are experiencing email support disruptions due to a global Microsoft Outlook outage, affecting carriers such as IndiGo and Akasa Air. While email services face delays, Air India reported that its flight operations and communication channels remain unaffected as of November 13, 2026.

Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to repair a major outage of Outlook were not going as expected and the firm was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without its crucial services. 

The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, has hit email as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

The impact of the outage has been felt globally, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Outlook.  

Microsoft has reported only “limited recovery” so far, warning that services will return gradually as users’ apps reconnect. It has paused deployments, moved traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted servers as engineers work on alternative fixes.

The outage has exposed how heavily businesses depend on cloud services. In an opinion piece for Gulf News, Anoop Paudval, Head of Information Security GRC at Gulf News, argues that cloud availability is not the same as business resilience, and urges companies to plan for outages with backup communication, offline continuity and regular outage drills. Read more: O365 to O364: The day the world’s business lost a working day

Microsoft has blamed connectivity errors in part of its Exchange Online infrastructure, the system behind Outlook email, along with elevated load across multiple regions. The company first said the issue was limited to the Americas, but later warned it could affect users “in any region”. Read our explainer: Microsoft outage explained: What went wrong with Outlook and Teams, and how it is hitting UAE users

Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams were the three most reported services on Downdetector’s UAE site on Friday morning, with sharp spikes in complaints, showing that the disruption that began on Thursday was still affecting users across the country.