Global Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Outlook and Teams Across France and 74 Countries

A major service disruption across Microsoft's cloud infrastructure has left tens of thousands of corporate users without access to Outlook, Teams, and essential Microsoft 365 applications. The outage, which began on Thursday, November 12, is currently affecting 74 countries and territories, causing widespread operational delays across major European business hubs, including Paris.

The server failures have primarily locked users out of Exchange Online, preventing the sending and receiving of emails. The disruption has also temporarily degraded functionality for the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot.

Because Microsoft 365 serves as a primary enterprise software infrastructure for many French corporations, the global service degradation directly impacts corporate communication channels and cloud operations for businesses based in Paris and the broader Île-de-France region. The server failure has also triggered secondary disruptions in the broader technology sector, with artificial intelligence firms OpenAI and Anthropic confirming that their tools experienced disruptions involving connections to Microsoft services.

Microsoft has formally stated that it has found no evidence of malicious activity or a cyberattack behind the incident. According to corporate updates, the disruption stems from failing server health checks, which limited the types of traffic reaching servers and disrupted Exchange Online.

In response, Microsoft has applied software patches to address server stability. While the company reported on Friday morning that these technical fixes are showing early signs of stabilization and traffic is gradually being reintroduced, Microsoft confirmed that service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and intermittent connection failures may persist.

Read also: French expert commission presents 18 recommendations to regulate AI chatbots, retail group Plesio reaches agreement in principle to cut debt, and OpenAI and Anthropic leaders urge caution at UN Security Council meeting.

Source: The Guardian (outage timeline and cyberattack ruling); Wire (74-country footprint and technical failure details); Petri IT Knowledgebase (software patch and recovery efforts); Computer Weekly (status update quotes). Published November 12 to 13, 2026.

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