Microsoft has reported further progress in restoring services affected by a widespread connectivity issue involving Exchange Online and Microsoft 365, with improvements across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues and delayed email delivery as the company works to stabilise its infrastructure and clear backlogs.
In its latest update on November 13, the company's official Microsoft 365 Status account on X said it was seeing broader improvements in North America, sustained recovery across much of Europe and encouraging signs of recovery in Asia Pacific.
Microsoft said its focus remained on stabilising infrastructure that had been restored, completing mitigation measures in the remaining affected areas and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs. The company is also validating service consistency across different connection methods.
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We're seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific. Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure. Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/bVoAAh3D2G if the admin center is not available to you.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026
Earlier, Microsoft said some servers that had been restored to service were becoming unresponsive again after receiving traffic. The company was analysing diagnostic data to identify what was triggering the behaviour and testing different recovery measures to restore service without overloading the affected infrastructure.
What Caused The Outage?
Microsoft's investigation identified unexpectedly unavailable servers as a major factor behind the infrastructure problems.
In an earlier update, the company clarified that the elevated infrastructure load was not being caused by an increase in overall traffic. Instead, several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, shifting additional demand onto the remaining infrastructure.
Microsoft also identified problems involving automated server health checks. These checks are designed to determine whether servers are functioning properly and can continue processing requests. The company said that a particular component responsible for processing server health information appeared to be contributing to the failures.
In a subsequent update, Microsoft said a core process on affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections was becoming overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests.
The company was also investigating recent configuration updates and a network configuration change that coincided with the beginning of the disruption.
Microsoft has not announced a definitive root cause in the updates available at the time of reporting.
Microsoft's Recovery Plan
Microsoft has been pursuing several measures to restore services and improve infrastructure stability:
1. Restarting affected servers: Bringing unavailable infrastructure back online and checking whether the servers remain stable after receiving traffic.
2. Isolating infrastructure: Testing recovery measures on selected portions of the affected environment before expanding them more widely.
3. Redirecting traffic: Moving connections to alternative routes and distributing traffic across available infrastructure to reduce pressure on affected servers.
4. Restricting traffic: Temporarily limiting certain types of traffic reaching affected infrastructure to identify requests that may be contributing to server instability.
5. Alternative health checks: Testing a different service-health validation method to help affected servers return to service.
6. Automated recovery: Preparing systems to identify unresponsive servers and restart them automatically.
7. Configuration changes: Investigating and testing changes to server and network configurations to improve infrastructure stability.
The latest update indicates that Microsoft's recovery efforts are yielding improvements across multiple regions. However, the company is still working to stabilise restored infrastructure and address remaining affected areas.
As of the latest update on November 13, Microsoft had not announced a complete restoration of all affected services or provided a definitive timeline for resolving the disruption. Users may continue to experience intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery while the company works to clear backlogs.
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