Microsoft worldwide outage affects City of Hamilton, McMaster University

The Microsoft Corporation says it is still trying to resolve outage issues affecting many of its services that were affected on Thursday afternoon, and it’s having both global and local impacts.

The outage has impacted Microsoft Outlook, Teams and the tech giant’s AI assistant called Copilot, among other services.

Last night the City of Hamilton addressed the issue on ‘X,’ saying that the Microsoft 365 outage is affecting the City’s email services and may impact online services, including their website.

A global Microsoft 365 outage is affecting City of Hamilton email services and may impact access to online services, including https://t.co/j2ke0qeI82. Email responses may be delayed.

You can still reach the City by calling 905-546-2489.

— City of Hamilton (@cityofhamilton) November 13, 2026

Learning institutions around the world have also felt the impact.

At 4:30 p.m. yesterday McMaster University confirmed that some of its services such as online forums, service requests, automated approvals and reporting tools could be affected.

In updates overnight, Microsoft said it continues to encounter into issues with servers that are preventing them from working properly.

The company says it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and was treating the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”

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