Plymouth town hall says it cannot receive emails during a Microsoft outage

PLYMOUTH Developing, 8:20 p.m., Nov. 12, 2026.

A Microsoft outage has left Plymouth's town offices without email, and the town says it has not been able to receive or access messages recently sent to it.

"The Town is currently experiencing an outage affecting Microsoft Outlook and, as a result, does not have access to its email system," Plymouth wrote in a notice posted at 5:41 p.m. "If you have recently sent an email to the Town, please be aware that we have not been able to receive or access your message at this time." The town said it will post an update as soon as email service is restored.

Dartmouth has posted a running notice on the outage, last updated at 5:30 p.m., that relays Microsoft's own updates and says the outage is affecting Microsoft 365 applications, including sending and receiving email. The town's first entry cited Microsoft's status page as of 1:08 p.m., when the company said it was investigating reports of users having trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes through several connection methods in the Americas.

What Microsoft has said

Microsoft posted updates through the afternoon, and Dartmouth relayed them on its notice. In the update Dartmouth posted at 2:35 p.m., the company said the strain on its system was not coming from more traffic but from "a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure," and that it had paused all deployments and configuration changes while it reviewed recent changes.

In Dartmouth's 3 p.m. update, Microsoft said the affected servers were failing automated health checks, possibly because of a recent change to a part of the system that processes those checks, and that it had begun restarting all of the affected servers. About 4 p.m., it said an alternative health check method had returned some of the servers to service and that it was applying the change more broadly, according to CNBC, which quoted the company.

The outage was not over by early evening, and in the statement Dartmouth posted with its 5:30 p.m. update, Microsoft said its actions "have not provided the anticipated relief." The company said a core process on the affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, which stops the servers from responding, and that it was isolating part of its infrastructure, restarting the affected components and slowly bringing traffic back to check that service stays stable before using that approach more widely.

Microsoft's own service status page still listed the problem as a service degradation in an update at 8:06 p.m. The company said there that a process on the affected servers that sets up secure connections was becoming overwhelmed and causing the servers to stop handling requests, and that it was testing a configuration change on some servers before applying it more widely along with restarts of the affected servers. It said it had also begun reversing a recent network configuration change that lines up with the start of the outage, and that its next update would come by 9 p.m.

Besides Exchange Online email, the services Microsoft listed as possibly affected include Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, Planner, To Do and Intune, according to Dartmouth's notice. ABC News reported that Microsoft said a separate Teams problem earlier in the day had been fixed. The outage began shortly before 1 p.m., and at one point about 130,000 users had reported problems with Outlook to the tracking site Downdetector, CNBC reported.

How to reach town hall

Plymouth Town Hall, 26 Court St., is open from 7:30 a.m. to noon on Fridays and can be reached at 508-747-1620.

Dartmouth Town Hall, 400 Slocum Road, is open from 8 to 11 a.m. on Fridays, and the town says its front entrance is closed, so visitors should park in the rear and use the back lot entrance. The Select Board and town administrator's office is at 508-910-1813, the town clerk at 508-910-1800 and the town collector at 508-910-1806.

What we do not know yet

Plymouth has not said when its email will be back or whether messages sent during the outage will be delivered once it is, and Microsoft gave no time for a full repair in its 8:06 p.m. update. We will update this story as service returns.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.