A worldwide Microsoft outage disrupted courts across the United States on Thursday, November 12, 2026, leaving emergency protection order requests potentially undelivered and forcing federal courts to adopt alternative filing procedures as widespread email failures continued into Friday.
Maine's judicial branch warned that requests for protection orders emailed after 12:30 p.m. Thursday may never have reached the courts. Officials urged applicants to submit paper copies Friday morning after the state's court email system went offline around 1 p.m.
The warning raised immediate concerns for people seeking court protection from abuse, harassment or threats. Applicants whose requests failed to arrive could face delays in obtaining judicial review, although the extent of any disruption to individual cases remains unclear.
Federal courts in Maine also lost access to email systems used to receive certain filings. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maine instructed attorneys and other parties with time-sensitive documents to submit paper copies until service returned. Anyone uncertain whether an earlier submission had arrived was advised to contact the clerk's office.
At the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, email failures disrupted the clerk's office for much of Thursday. The court's electronic filing system and PACER, the federal judiciary's public records platform, remained operational, but attorneys and litigants relying on Microsoft email faced delays receiving notifications about developments in their cases.
Colorado's judicial branch also reported disruptions to court operations, including email and other Microsoft applications.
Similar problems reached Canadian courts. Alberta's Court of King's Bench warned that the outage could delay electronic submissions and the processing of court documents. People seeking urgent judicial orders were directed to file their applications in person.
The court disruptions came as Microsoft struggled to restore Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services used by businesses, government agencies and legal institutions worldwide. The failures also affected features in Teams, SharePoint and Copilot, extending the disruption beyond email.
Microsoft traced the problems to overloaded infrastructure, including servers that stopped responding as processes used to establish secure connections became overwhelmed. Engineers restarted affected systems, redirected traffic and adjusted how requests were handled to restore capacity.
By Friday, Microsoft reported improving server stability and progress restoring services across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Some users continued experiencing intermittent access problems and delayed messages as recovery efforts proceeded.
The company said it had found no indication that malicious activity caused the outage.
Maine's judicial branch instructed anyone who emailed a protection order request during Thursday's disruption to submit a paper copy Friday morning, leaving applicants to confirm that their requests had reached the court and could proceed to judicial review.
