Microsoft Outage Affecting Millions Across the Globe, Including in El Paso

EL PASO, Tx., November 13, 2026: Not getting emails? Are you receiving less emails than usual? You’re not alone, millions across the globe, businesses and people alike are learning what it means to rely on what engineers have long called a “single-point” of failure. Engineers look for single points of failure (SPOF) when designing things, like buildings, bridges and software. A single point of failure is when one component fails, and the failure brings down an entire system.

When it comes to computers, a server is usually a single point of failure in that when it goes down it affects the business at many levels, for example cash registers cannot complete sales.

But in an increasingly subscription-based ecosystem where email, web services, and other online software are all served from one provider, the provider becomes the single point of failure, something millions are experiencing today with the lack of email or Teams meetings that they have come to depend on.

Since around 9:00am yesterday, Microsoft services like Outlook (Hotmail/MSN/Hotmail/Others), OneDrive and Teams, among other services have been inaccessible to many users. The Microsoft failure has affected ambulance services, school and police forces across the globe.

As of this morning, Microsoft is still struggling to fix the problem that began yesterday. Microsoft has said the failure is technical and not the result of “malicious activity.”

The disruption has affected jails in Colorado with inmates unable to bond out because Outlook is not working.

Government offices in Detroit and Michigan are reporting problems with government services, as well as many New Mexico government offices and hospitals.

Congressional offices are also being affected by the outage, with staffers reporting that all their work is dependent on Outlook, forcing them to stop working on legislation.

The latest report from Microsoft about its 365 service says that its services continue to be degraded. The company says it has it is “continuing our work to isolate the issue affecting server availability.”

The service outage has affected users in at least 74 countries.

Newsrooms across the country have been slow to report on the global outage because many newsrooms depend on Microsoft services to operate their newsrooms.

Microsoft has not said when it anticipates resolving the problem with its services, although it has said they are seeing “encouraging recovery” in Europe and North America. Users in El Paso began reporting yesterday that they were not able to access email since the morning.

No official word yet from the City of El Paso and the County of El Paso, which are known users of Microsoft products, how the outage has affected them.

Other email services like Google mail have remained unaffected by the outage, except that email to or from Microsoft email accounts are not reaching Microsoft accounts or arriving from them.

This is a developing story and we will bring you updates as they become available.

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Microsoft Outage Affecting Millions Across the Globe, Including in El Paso

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