Microsoft email outage lasts about 19 hours, hitting exchanges and governments
A Microsoft cloud failure knocked email offline for about 19 hours, affecting exchanges, hospitals and governments. The company blamed a botched network upgrade, WSJ reports.
- published on Newsmetry
- original source published
the same feed is available to bots and dashboards through the api. connect the api →
what happened
According to The Wall Street Journal, a Microsoft cloud failure starting around 12:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday took the company's email and other services offline. The disruption lasted about 19 hours and reached roughly half a billion people.
The outage hit healthcare providers, stock exchanges including Euronext, shipping group Maersk, U.S. city governments and the House of Representatives. Microsoft said the cause was a network upgrade that went wrong, not a hack, and that it restored services gradually. Microsoft Teams stayed up for many users, while Workhorse Group had to move its third-quarter earnings call to the following week.
why it matters
For markets the effect looks limited: the incident is mainly an operational and reputational problem for Microsoft rather than a change to its business outlook. It does highlight how many companies and exchanges depend on a handful of cloud providers, which is why investors tend to watch such failures closely.
tags
instruments
sources
- The Chaos and Unexpected Joys of a 19-Hour Global Email Outage — WSJ, 14 November 2026 at 00:04 UTC
prepared by the newsmetry newsroom with ai assistance from the sources listed below. not investment advice.
alerts on your topics, the morning digest and the api — in your account.
get stories in real time ↗