The Microsoft outage that hit Outlook and other enterprise services on November 12 is the largest of 2026 by user reports, according to a report Ookla and DownDetector published November 13.
DownDetector, which gauges outages by counting problem reports submitted by users, logged 7.4 million reports for Microsoft's services. The previous leader, a YouTube outage in February, drew 2.8 million, so Microsoft's total is roughly 2.6 times larger. At the peak, the site received 19,650 reports per minute, more than 1,500 times the normal level. Users were still reporting errors nearly 24 hours in.
Duration may be the sturdier measure. Outlook and other Microsoft enterprise services were down for more than 24 hours, against 11 hours for a Microsoft outage in August. As of late afternoon November 13, the problems appeared to be subsiding, but the company had not published an estimate for full recovery. It declined to comment on the Ookla report.
The caveat is built into the method. A report count measures how many people complained, not how many were affected or how badly. Companies have disputed DownDetector's data before. Amazon Web Services did so after the site incorrectly showed AWS problems at the same time as the Outlook failure on November 12.
That makes the 7.4 million figure a useful signal, not a precise one. Comparing it with a YouTube outage also mixes two different kinds of failure: a video site people check on their own, and workplace software that stalls a workday. Hours of downtime do not depend on how many users bother to file a report, and on that count the gap with August is wide.
The 2026 ranking is also provisional, since the year is not over. Microsoft has not yet said when service will be fully restored, so the final tally of this outage is still open.