Microsoft 365 Outage: Outlook "Can't Reach the Internet"? Your Wi-Fi Is Probably Innocent

Last updated on the morning of 13 November 2026, Singapore time. In the updates we reviewed, Microsoft reported partial recovery and had not published a root cause or declared the incident closed. Microsoft tracks it as EX1550543 (Exchange Online) and MO1550821 (Microsoft 365) in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

If your Friday began with Outlook announcing that it "can't reach the internet" while every other website loaded perfectly, you were not alone, and you can stop glaring at the router. Microsoft has been dealing with a Microsoft 365 outage since the early hours of Friday, Singapore time.

Here is what Microsoft has actually said, where to find the official status, and what to do while you wait. We have kept to Microsoft's own posts and documentation for the facts, with a source under each section, and marked our own observations and suggestions as ours. SourceIT is an independent IT reseller and does not speak for Microsoft.

What has Microsoft confirmed?

Microsoft's status account posted a running commentary through the incident. Paraphrased, and in order, on 12 November 2026 (US time):

Source: Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) posts on X: post A, post B, post C, post D. Statement 8 is Microsoft's update as quoted by WLKY. Microsoft's posts direct customers to EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and to status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is unavailable.

What we do not know yet: the root cause, the confirmed end time, and what Microsoft will change afterwards. Microsoft has not published those, and we are not going to guess. Its post-incident report will appear under the incident in Service health.

Which services did Microsoft list?

Microsoft's advisory MO1550821 listed Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR as potentially impacted. Press reports of later updates to Microsoft's status page add Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Microsoft Purview. In short: if your plan B for "email is down" was "message them on Teams", you needed a plan C.

Whether your own organisation was affected, and for how long, is shown in your Service health dashboard.

Source: Microsoft advisory MO1550821, as reported by Engadget. Check the advisory in your admin center for the authoritative list.

Where do you check the official status?

Skip the group-chat rumours. Microsoft documents three places to look:

The status labels have specific meanings. Here is Microsoft's own glossary, paraphrased:

Microsoft also distinguishes an incident, a critical issue where a service or major function is unavailable, from an advisory, where a problem affects some users but the service remains available.

Source: Microsoft Learn, How to check Microsoft 365 service health.

Is it really not your Wi-Fi? What we saw from Singapore

We ran our own checks from one office network in Singapore at about 9:00am SGT on 13 November. These are our observations, not Microsoft statements, and your experience may differ.

So in our case the internet was fine and the Outlook web addresses were not answering, which points to the service and not the office network. The desktop app looked healthy only because it was showing mail it already had. A quick way to check your own situation:

1. Open two or three unrelated websites. If they load, your internet connection is working.
2. Try Outlook on a phone using mobile data, not office Wi-Fi.
3. Ask a colleague, ideally at another site, whether they see the same thing.
4. Check Microsoft's official status channels listed above.

Source: SourceIT's own checks.

What can staff do in the meantime?

Mostly: resist the urge to fix it. This is general guidance from SourceIT, not from Microsoft.

• Retry now and then. Microsoft has said recovery may be gradual as clients reconnect.
• Pick up the phone. Use phone, SMS or another messaging channel for urgent matters. Microsoft Teams is on Microsoft's list of potentially impacted services.
• Work from mail already on your device. Desktop Outlook can show mail it has previously downloaded. New messages you write wait in the Outbox until the connection returns.
• Check your Outbox afterwards to confirm queued messages were sent.
• Confirm time-critical items by phone. Under standard email delivery, a sending server normally queues a message and retries when the destination does not respond, so mail is generally delayed and not discarded. Delivery times are not guaranteed.
• Leave the settings alone. Reinstalling Office, clearing browser data or resetting passwords will not resolve a service-side incident, and clearing data may remove locally stored mail.
• Be suspicious of helpful strangers. Treat unexpected messages or calls offering to restore your mailbox, or asking for your password, with caution.

What should an IT manager do, step by step?

Your job in a provider incident is to confirm, communicate and protect. You cannot restart Microsoft's servers, and nobody expects you to. This checklist is SourceIT's general guidance; steps that rely on Microsoft features cite Microsoft's documentation.

First 15 minutes: confirm and scope

1. Reproduce it yourself on two devices and two networks.
2. Check your own environment. Confirm the internet link, firewall and DNS are working by loading unrelated sites.
3. Check Service health. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center and go to Health, then Service health. If you cannot sign in, use status.cloud.microsoft.
4. Record the incident references shown for your tenant, and the time you first saw impact. For this incident Microsoft's references are EX1550543 and MO1550821.
5. Scope the impact. Note which services fail for your users and how many users are affected.
6. Rule out recent changes to licences, conditional access, DNS or mail routing in your own tenant.
7. Report it if it is not listed. Microsoft's documentation says that if you see a problem that is not listed on the Service health page, you can select Report an issue and complete a short form. Submissions appear on the Reported issues tab.

First hour: communicate and set up workarounds

1. Send one staff notice through a channel that does not depend on Microsoft 365. Emailing everyone that email is down has a known flaw. A template follows below.
2. Brief management: what is affected, what Microsoft has said, and when you will update them next.
3. Activate fallback channels for internal coordination and for customers.
4. Brief customer-facing teams with a short, factual script.
5. Identify time-critical work, such as quotations, tenders, payroll or invoices, and arrange another route.
6. Tell staff what still works, such as previously downloaded mail and locally synced files.

While the incident continues: monitor and protect

• Follow Microsoft's updates. You can turn on email notifications in Service health under Customize, then Email, or select an active issue and choose Manage notifications for this issue.
• Update staff at regular intervals, even when the update is "no change". Silence is what makes people start rebooting things.
• Postpone planned changes to your Microsoft 365 tenant until the incident is closed.
• Be careful with mail routing. Changing MX or other DNS records under pressure carries its own risk. Take advice before doing so.
• Avoid mass resets of passwords, multi-factor authentication or Outlook profiles.
• Check your own mail queues if you run an email security gateway, an on-premises relay or a hybrid Exchange server.
• Note automated senders, such as scanners, accounting systems and website forms that send through Microsoft 365, so you can verify them later.
• Keep a timeline of status changes, notices sent and business impact reported.

When service returns: verify before announcing

1. Test mail flow both ways with an external account.
2. Check shared mailboxes and distribution groups.
3. Ask staff to check their Outbox.
4. Use message trace in the Exchange admin center for any important message reported missing.
5. Confirm Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint, including file sync.
6. Re-test automated senders.
7. Send the all-clear after these checks, not after the first successful login.

Within the following week: close it out

• Read Microsoft's post-incident report when the incident status changes to Post-incident report published.
• Record the duration and business impact for your organisation.
• If you intend to request a service credit, see the section below and check your agreement.
• Write a short incident summary for management.
• Update your outage plan while the memory is fresh.

Source for Service health features: Microsoft Learn, How to check Microsoft 365 service health.

Staff notice template

Subject: Microsoft 365 service incident, no action needed

Microsoft has reported a service incident affecting Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook. We are monitoring Microsoft's updates.

Please do not reinstall or reset anything. You can still read mail already in desktop Outlook, and messages you write will be sent when the connection returns.

For urgent matters, use [fallback channel]. Customers can reach us on [phone number].

IT will send the next update at [time].

Can you get a service credit? What Microsoft's documents say

Microsoft publishes a Service Level Agreement for Microsoft Online Services. It sets out the uptime commitment for each service, how downtime is defined, the service credit levels and how to claim. The agreement is revised periodically, and the edition in force at the time of the incident applies. We do not reproduce its figures here; read the document itself.

Microsoft's guidance for partners states the following about service level agreement credits:

• For services bought through the Cloud Solution Provider programme, only direct and indirect providers can submit the credit request.
• For services other than Azure, the request must be submitted within one month from the end of the billing month in which the incident occurred.
• The request needs the customer's tenant ID, the incident identifier from Service health, and proof that the customer experienced the outage and asked for the credit, sent from an email address on the affected tenant's domain.
• Credit is determined by the specific services affected, not the customer's whole plan, and is prorated by the affected service and the duration of the outage.
• Advisory posts are typically not eligible, and the final incident post and post-incident review should be checked.

Whether any credit is due for your organisation is decided by Microsoft under your agreement. If you buy licences through a reseller or provider, ask them how a request is handled. We cover the process in more detail in how to claim a Microsoft 365 service credit and how to complain to Microsoft about the Outlook outage.

Source: Microsoft, Service Level Agreement for Microsoft Online Services; Microsoft Learn, How and when to request a credit from Microsoft.

Whose job is it to be ready next time?

Microsoft's shared responsibility guidance states that, whatever the type of cloud deployment, the customer always retains responsibility for its data, endpoints, accounts and access management. For software as a service, Microsoft is responsible for the underlying layers such as the physical infrastructure, network controls and operating system. Microsoft notes that this guidance is illustrative and does not change any agreement.

The practical reading: how your office keeps working during a service incident, and how your data is protected, are yours to decide. Some common preparations, offered as general guidance from SourceIT:

You cannot schedule your provider's bad day. You can decide how much of your own day it takes with it.

One honest caveat: a backup does not keep email flowing during a provider incident. It gives you a separate copy of mailboxes and files. See Synology NAS for Microsoft 365 backup, backup is not disaster recovery and email continuity options for SMEs.

Source: Microsoft Learn, Shared responsibility in the cloud.

More on the Microsoft 365 outage

• How to complain to Microsoft about the Outlook outage
• How to claim a Microsoft 365 service credit
• Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude connectors during the outage
• Email continuity options for SMEs

Planning in Singapore

For backup storage and continuity planning, use Request for Quotation on a product page, call (65) 6978 3502, email Sales@sourceit.com.sg or use our contact page.

Frequently asked questions

What are Microsoft's incident references? EX1550543 for Exchange Online and MO1550821 for Microsoft 365. Administrators can look them up under Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

What has Microsoft said about the cause? Microsoft has said a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure, and that servers were failing automated health checks. In the updates we reviewed it had not published a root cause.

Which services did Microsoft list? Advisory MO1550821 listed Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR as potentially impacted. Check the advisory for the current list.

Where is the official status? In Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or at status.cloud.microsoft if you cannot sign in.

Why did Outlook on the web say it could not reach the internet? In our own checks, that page appeared while the Outlook web addresses were not responding and other websites loaded normally.

Can we request a service credit? Microsoft's Service Level Agreement sets out when credits apply and how to claim. Check the agreement and ask whoever supplies your licences.

When will it be fully resolved? Microsoft had not given a completion time in the updates we reviewed. Check Service health for the latest status.

Sources

Microsoft:

• Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status), updates on EX1550543 and MO1550821
• Microsoft service health status page
• Microsoft Learn: How to check Microsoft 365 service health
• Microsoft Learn: How and when to request a credit from Microsoft
• Microsoft: Service Level Agreement for Microsoft Online Services
• Microsoft Learn: Shared responsibility in the cloud

Press reports quoting Microsoft's updates: WLKY, Engadget.

This article is general information compiled from the sources above as at the date shown. It is not legal, contractual or professional advice, and it is not a statement by or on behalf of Microsoft. Microsoft, Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Refer to Microsoft's official communications and your own agreement.