Asan Tata— November 13, 2026The Microsoft Outlook outage has hit the UAE, leaving residents and businesses unable to send emails, open inboxes or use Teams for most of Thursday and Friday. The disruption began on Thursday evening, 12 November 2026, and spread across Outlook, Microsoft 365 and several other Microsoft services. By Friday evening, some users in the UAE started receiving emails again, but Microsoft had not yet confirmed that services were fully restored.
For many people in the UAE, email is the backbone of the working day. Offices send contracts and approvals by email, schools contact parents by email, and banks share updates by email. When Outlook stopped working, much of that routine slowed down or stopped. This article explains what happened, which services were affected, how the outage hit the UAE, and what you should do if your email is still not working.
Quick Answer
The Microsoft Outlook outage began on Thursday evening, 12 November 2026, and affected Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services in the UAE and around the world. Microsoft blamed connectivity errors and heavy load in part of its Exchange Online system. By Friday evening, 13 November, email delivery had started to return for some users in the UAE, with messages arriving from about 5.20pm. Microsoft had not confirmed full restoration by Friday night. If your email is still down, do not delete your account or send the same message many times. Check the Microsoft service health page, use another channel such as WhatsApp or a phone call for urgent matters, and wait for delayed mail. Microsoft extended its email delivery window to 48 hours, so messages sent during the outage should still reach you by Saturday afternoon.
Microsoft Outlook Outage: What Happened and When
The trouble started late on Thursday, 12 November. Microsoft first posted about the problem at about 9.50pm UAE time. Within hours, users in the UAE and other countries found that Outlook would not load, emails would not send, and inboxes would not refresh.
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded about 140,000 reports of Outlook problems from users in 74 countries on Thursday evening. In the UAE, reports first spiked to close to 300 at around 10.30pm on Thursday, then rose again from about 6am on Friday and peaked at more than 550 reports just after 9am. Reports stayed above 200 into the afternoon, which showed the problem was not yet fixed.
Of the problems reported in the UAE, 42 per cent were with the Outlook app, 29 per cent were with receiving messages, and 18 per cent were with logging in.
Microsoft said its first attempts to fix the problem did not work as expected, so engineers tried other options. They restarted affected servers, shifted traffic to alternative routes, and paused new deployments. Later on Friday, the company said it was expanding a technical patch across more of its infrastructure after seeing improvements in server stability. The patch targets the part of the system that handles secure connections and message routing.
Which Services Were Affected
The outage was wider than email alone. Microsoft said the disruption affected Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services. A notice on the company’s website also listed OneDrive, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner and Windows 365.
Microsoft said that features of Microsoft 365 that relied on Exchange Online and email were affected, while parts that did not depend on Exchange Online kept working. That is why some people could open a document but could not send it by email, or could see a file in OneDrive but could not share it.
The disruption also spread beyond Microsoft’s own products. OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind ChatGPT and Claude, both reported problems linked to the outage.
A separate incident affected Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Contact Center, which companies use to handle customer-service calls and chats. That problem lasted nearly eight hours and was fixed at 00.57 GMT on Friday, which was 4.57am in the UAE. Microsoft said it was separate from the wider Exchange Online outage.
How the Outage Hit UAE Residents and Businesses
For many UAE businesses, Friday was a very difficult day. Offices rely on email for approvals, invoices and contracts. With Outlook down, staff turned to WhatsApp, phone calls and other channels to keep work moving.
Danube Group, one of the UAE’s largest private companies, said the disruption had hit its daily work hard. Financial approvals became difficult because several people need to be tagged on the same message. The company created WhatsApp groups and processed some transactions through them instead.
Electronics retailer Eros Group said only its email communication was affected. Its core sales and logistics operations run on a separate system and stayed fully operational.
Schools and Students Felt It Too
Schools were also affected. Al Sadiq Islamic English School warned parents on Friday morning that email communication might be temporarily affected, and asked them to call its landline for urgent matters.
Middlesex University Dubai also warned students that replies from its Careers Office might be delayed until the service was fully restored.
Aiza Khan, an IT student in Dubai, said Microsoft Word stopped responding while she was editing a document in class on Friday morning. When she tried to recover the file through OneDrive, she was taken to an error page each time.
What Microsoft Says Caused the Outage
Microsoft has blamed connectivity errors in part of its Exchange Online infrastructure, along with elevated load across several regions. In plain terms, a core process that sets up secure connections on affected servers became overwhelmed and could not keep up with demand. That caused capacity loss, which meant servers could not process requests as normal.
The company said it moved traffic away from affected infrastructure, restarted servers, and applied fixes in stages.
Microsoft also said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the outage, and it had found no evidence of a cyberattack.
This is the second major Microsoft disruption in about a month. The company reported a separate outage of its Azure cloud platform last month, which also affected its productivity software and industries around the world.
Recovery Status: What Is Working Now
Recovery has been slow and uneven. Microsoft reported only limited recovery for much of Friday, and warned that services would return gradually.
By Friday afternoon, Microsoft said recovery was progressing across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America and sustained gains across much of Europe. Some users in Asia Pacific might still face intermittent mailbox access problems or delayed email delivery.
In the UAE, the first clear signs of recovery came on Friday evening. Users began receiving emails again from about 5.20pm local time, on both desktop and mobile. Gulf News reported at 6.37pm that previously delayed messages were now arriving in inboxes.
Even so, Microsoft had not confirmed full restoration by Friday night. Microsoft extended its email delivery window to 48 hours, so delayed emails have until at least Saturday afternoon to reach recipients.
What to Do If Your Email Is Still Down
If Outlook is still not working for you, do not panic. The problem is on Microsoft’s side, not on your device. These steps will help you stay in control while the service returns.
1. Check the Official Status Page First
Visit Microsoft’s service health page before you change any settings. If it still shows a problem, the fault is still being fixed. Do not reinstall Outlook or delete your account, because that may remove saved messages.
2. Use Another Channel for Urgent Messages
For anything urgent, switch to a different channel. Use WhatsApp, a phone call or a text message. Many UAE businesses did exactly this on Friday.
3. Do Not Send the Same Email Again and Again
Sending the same message many times will not make it arrive faster. It will only add to the backlog. Send it once, and if it is urgent, follow up by phone or WhatsApp and say your email may be delayed.
4. Save Your Work Locally
If Word or another Microsoft 365 app stops responding, save your document to your device instead of to OneDrive until the cloud service is fully back.
5. Watch Out for Scam Messages
Outages attract scammers. Be careful of messages that claim to offer a quick fix for Outlook, or ask you to click a link and enter your password. Microsoft will not ask you to reset your password by email to fix an outage.
6. Give Delayed Mail Time to Arrive
Microsoft extended the email delivery window to 48 hours, so messages sent during the outage should still arrive by Saturday afternoon. Before you assume a message is lost, wait until Saturday and check your inbox again.
Flights and Other Services: What Was Not Affected
Not everything stopped. In the UAE, there were no reported flight delays linked to the outage. Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected, although it was closely monitoring the situation. IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected and warned passengers that replies might be delayed.
Air India and Air India Express were scheduled to operate 16 flights from Dubai International Airport from 12pm onwards on Friday. All flights were listed as departing on time on the Dubai Airports website.
Other services were hit harder. Immigration New Zealand said it had paused the processing of all visa applications until further notice. In Australia, government and healthcare services were disrupted, including Service NSW and Queensland Health.
Why This Outage Matters for UAE Businesses
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, based on figures on Microsoft’s website. That scale explains why one outage can slow down offices, schools and hospitals in many countries at the same time. In the UAE, where most companies use Outlook and Teams every day, the effect was felt within hours.
The outage has also started a wider conversation about backup plans. A Gulf News opinion piece argued that cloud availability is not the same as business resilience, and urged companies to plan for outages with backup communication and regular outage drills.
For small businesses, the lesson is simple. Keep a second way to reach customers and staff, such as WhatsApp, and keep important documents saved on your own device as well as in the cloud. Expect some delays to continue into Saturday as the backlog of emails clears.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Microsoft Outlook outage start?
The outage began on Thursday evening, 12 November 2026. Microsoft first posted about the problem at about 9.50pm UAE time.
Which Microsoft services were affected?
Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner and Windows 365 were all affected. Microsoft said features that relied on Exchange Online and email were hit hardest.
Is the outage fixed now?
Not fully. By Friday evening, 13 November, some users in the UAE started receiving emails again from about 5.20pm. Microsoft had not confirmed full restoration by Friday night.
Was the outage caused by a cyberattack?
Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the outage and had found no evidence of a cyberattack. The company blamed connectivity errors and elevated load in part of its Exchange Online infrastructure.
Will my delayed emails still arrive?
Most likely, yes. Microsoft extended its email timeout to 48 hours, so delayed emails have until at least Saturday afternoon to reach recipients.
What should I do if Outlook still does not work?
Check the official Microsoft service health page first. Do not delete your account or reinstall Outlook. Use WhatsApp or a phone call for urgent matters, save your work locally, and wait for delayed mail to arrive.
Disclaimer
This article is for general information only and is based on reports published on 13 November 2026 by Khaleej Times, Gulf News and The National, along with statements from Microsoft. Service status can change quickly during an outage, so check the official Microsoft service health page for the latest updates. This article is not affiliated with Microsoft.
Last Updated: 13 November 2026
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