Microsoft's Exchange outage stalls offices as eBay shuts out robot shoppers

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For most of Thursday, November 12, 2026 and well into Friday, November 13, the email system that runs a large share of the world's offices simply stopped answering. Microsoft's Exchange Online outage took Outlook and Copilot's access to work data down with it, and by the time traffic recovered it had touched governments, banks and airlines, while leaving Microsoft's advertising business largely untouched. The same Friday brought a quieter but related argument about control. eBay confirmed it bars shopping agents it has not invited, a US survey found nearly two thirds of people want a browser they steer rather than one that steers them, and Apple agreed with Germany's competition authority to let apps ask users a second time about tracking. Between them, these stories describe an industry relearning how much depends on a handful of systems, and how little the people using them get to choose.

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A day without Exchange

The trouble began on Thursday afternoon, US time. Microsoft's status page acknowledged that "users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services," and by early Friday morning in Europe it listed 19 Microsoft 365 services affected through their dependence on Exchange Online. The list ran from Outlook on the web and desktop to ActiveSync, delayed mail delivery, Defender for Office 365 Safe Links, Purview and Graph API timeouts. One line stood out for anyone who has bought into Microsoft's AI pitch: "Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files." Downdetector reports for Outlook in the United States peaked above 120,000. At the 05:46 UTC update on Friday, more than 11 hours after problems started, Microsoft had no root cause and said: "As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident." PPC Land noted that the company's later mention of a "traffic influx" sat uneasily with its earlier explanation about servers being unavailable. Exchange Online carries a 99.9% monthly uptime commitment backed by service credits, which gives large customers a contractual reason to read the coming post-incident report closely.

Network data filled in what the status page did not. Kentik measured Exchange Online traffic running about 85% below normal from roughly 17:35 UTC on November 12, and PPC Land reported that Outlook came back carrying 18 hours of queued mail. Recovery began at 11:20 UTC on Friday, and by 13:25 UTC traffic was running about 19% above expected as the backlog landed. Devices opened up to 70% more connections while responses fell to about 27% of normal, a retry storm that knocked recovering servers back over. Cloudflare saw Exchange requests triple and about one in three Entra ID requests fail. "Microsoft's Exchange Online is back, and then some," said Doug Madory of Kentik. By Microsoft's 14:56 UTC update, which still described service as degraded, the incident had run 21 hours and 21 minutes. The company said it had "paused all deployments" and was moving traffic off the affected infrastructure, and it extended email timeouts to 48 hours so that queued messages would not bounce. Government offices in Japan, Australia, Singapore and Portugal were affected, along with banks and airlines, while EU institutions reported little impact.

Advertisers wanted to know whether their campaigns had gone dark too. The answer was mostly no. Exchange Online is the mail service behind Outlook for businesses and organisations, a version that carries no ads, so the outage fell mainly on office workers rather than on ad inventory. Search Engine Roundtable reported that Microsoft Advertising was not hit directly. Navah Hopkins, Microsoft's ads liaison, wrote on LinkedIn: "While Microsoft Advertising was not impacted directly, there may have been weakness in Outlook incoming ad requests." Any effect on ad requests was at the margins. The Microsoft Advertising status page marked ad delivery as affected while saying platform health was fine, and tied the closure of its own incident to the wider Microsoft 365 recovery. Microsoft apologised on X and traced the fault to an earlier network capacity upgrade exposed by a recent network change. "This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents," the company said.

Who gets to shop

While one giant was struggling to deliver mail, another was deciding who may buy from it. PPC Land reported that eBay bans robot shoppers unless eBay sends the invitation. The company's User Agreement bars "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" unless eBay has given prior express permission. The clause is not new. It arrived in the January 20, 2026 update, took effect on February 20 and survived unchanged into the version effective June 28. What changed in early November is that Meta's Muse agent lost reliable access to eBay listings, a block The Verge reported on November 10 and described as intermittent two days later. Spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand said eBay takes a selective approach: "We have restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data." The marketplace still allows some AI search and agent-assisted navigation, but it has not published which agents hold permission or how a developer would ask for it. HUMAN Security had earlier put Muse's share of daily AI agent requests at 72%, which makes the eBay decision less about a single agent than about the dominant one.

People, for their part, are not asking to be carried along. Shift Browser's 2027 State of Browsing Report, based on an MX8 Labs survey of 1,005 US internet users in September, found that 64% want a browser they steer, even if more control means more decisions. Some 68% had used an AI tool instead of traditional search in the past six months, so the appetite for AI is real. The discomfort is about delegation: 48% said they would be very uncomfortable with AI touching stored identifiers such as Social Security numbers, and 42% worried about AI taking actions they did not intend. Chrome was the primary desktop browser for 58%. "People are using AI every day, but they want to be the ones deciding how it works," said chief executive Neil Henderson. PPC Land pointed out that Shift sells a browser, published no questionnaire or margin of error, and offered no direct comparison with its previous report.

Opera made a related case from the other direction. Its State of Browser Choice report, fielded by Pollfish among 925 US adults, found that for one in six Chrome, Edge and Safari users the browser was never a choice. Among the 500 respondents who use one of those three as their main browser, 16% did not know a browser could be changed, 36% had never switched and 62% could name nothing beyond Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox. Privacy led the list of reasons people might switch. "For many mainstream users, the browser was never a decision," the report said. Opera analysed the results itself and published no fieldwork dates or weighting, and stated intent is a long way from actual switching.

Vivaldi, meanwhile, launched an enterprise product built on the same idea of restraint. Unveiled on November 12 at Web Summit in Lisbon, Vivaldi Enterprise lets organisations deploy the standard browser through existing management tools such as Microsoft Intune and Active Directory, with no licence fee and no new console. "Vivaldi Enterprise costs nothing to licence," the company said. It stresses its employee ownership, servers in Iceland and the absence of chatbots: "Vivaldi doesn't build AI chatbots or agents into the browser." With about 3.5 million active users and optional paid support as its only visible revenue line, the launch rests on Europe's push to reduce its dependence on US technology. Chief executive Jon von Tetzchner put it plainly: "I've spent 30 years building browsers for the people who use them."

A second chance to ask

Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt has been the single biggest obstacle for mobile advertisers since 2021. In Germany, it is about to soften. Commitments Apple made to the Bundeskartellamt, declared binding in August under case B7-54/25, mean apps can re-ask users who already said no. Developers get "the option to surface the New ATT Prompt once after implementation of the Commitments," including to users who previously declined, plus a yearly re-ask after any answer. The redesigned prompt drops the word "track," adds an optional "Additional Information" button and lets developers cite consents a user gave earlier. Apple may not charge for access to the advertising identifier, must align its own Personalized Ads prompt with the new rules and will answer to an independent monitoring trustee. Implementation is due within four months, and the commitments run for seven years. Opt-in rates under the old prompt sat between 11% and 15% in earlier estimates, while Adjust measured an industry average of 38% in the first quarter of 2026. The terms bind only in Germany, although Apple is rolling out a redesigned prompt in four other EU countries on terms it has not published.

Industry groups spent the day arguing that privacy can be engineered rather than merely asked for. IAB Europe published a 30-page guide on November 12 making the case for privacy-enhancing technologies in advertising. It covers seven categories, from differential privacy and federated learning to homomorphic encryption and trusted execution environments, and asks data protection authorities to treat their use as evidence of GDPR compliance, as a mitigating factor in fines and as a weight in legitimate interest assessments. "PETs turn legal requirements into verifiable code," the guide says. PPC Land observed that its two live examples both trace back to Google, and that Google's help pages say event-level on-device measurement is inactive in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, a detail the guide leaves out. The timing follows the European Data Protection Board's final legitimate interest guidelines, adopted on November 10.

In Germany, the digital association BVDW took a gentler route. Its "KI-Knigge," published on November 5, is a 17-part voluntary code for AI at work with 94 orientation points grouped under environmental, social and governance headings. It suggests capping prompt iterations to save energy, asking consent before AI summarises a meeting, labelling AI content, using only approved tools and giving every AI agent a named owner and a kill switch. "AI can take work off our hands, but not the responsibility for its use," said Maike Scholz of Deutsche Telekom, who led the work. Another line from the guide may outlast the rest: "The most sustainable amount of data is the amount that is never generated in the first place."

Regulators still have sharper tools than codes of conduct. Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Tinder's operator EUR11m over incomplete data downloads. Match Group's Irish unit, MTCH Technology Services, ran a "Download My Data" tool that left out some categories of personal data without saying so and gave others only in summary, a breach of GDPR Article 15(3). The DPC also issued a reprimand and ordered compliance within three months. "Tens of thousands of users used the Download My Data tool during the period of time assessed by this Inquiry," said Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle. The inquiry opened in January 2020, which means the decision took nearly seven years. Match Group plans to appeal.

The open source world honoured one of its own on the same Friday. Berlin developer Harald Welte received the European SFS Award 2026 for 30 years of opening black boxes at SFSCON in Bolzano. The citation credits his work leading Netfilter, the Linux firewall code that the Free Software Foundation Europe says runs on more than 15 billion computers, and his founding of gpl-violations.org in 2004, whose court actions proved the GPL could be enforced. PPC Land linked the award to the Software Freedom Conservancy's GPL suit against Vizio, a television maker that reported nearly $300 million in gross profit from advertising and data in 2022 against $15 million from hardware. "I feel like I did nothing else but follow my convictions and my moral compass," Welte said.

Google keeps testing

Google's search results had another restless day. Search Engine Roundtable reported that AI-generated images have returned to AI Overviews for some users, months after Google announced the feature in July and paused it in August. Derek Hobson spotted it first. At the time of the pause, Google's Robby Stein had said: "This was a small experiment we're no longer running." The images now appear in some browsers and not in others, which suggests another limited test.

Google Shopping on mobile picked up a new section. Search Engine Roundtable found a Shopping section named "Highlighted on the web", first spotted by Sachin Patel, on mobile product searches but not on desktop. Google has said nothing about how items earn the label. In Merchant Center, the Deal Ends annotation is no longer experimental. The badge shows time-sensitive deals below product prices in Product Listing Ads, and Google added India to the regions where it is unavailable, alongside the EEA, Switzerland and the UK.

On the campaign side, PPC News Feed reported that Google Ads is testing a "Limit audience reach" setting, spotted by Arpan Banerjee. It offers three options: do not limit reach, which Google recommends; limit to people matching only age and gender segments; or limit to people matching all selected segments, mainly for retargeting. The panel warns the strictest option "could significantly lower campaign performance and impressions." The test makes explicit what many advertisers suspected, that selected audiences have been treated as a starting point rather than a boundary.

The price of that reach is rising. B2B agency Grey Matter tracked 1,349 non-brand search keywords across 14 advertisers from April 2025 to September 2026 and found the same B2B Google clicks cost 21% more year over year, after controlling for budget, ad position and Quality Score. The typical account's actual non-brand cost per click rose 36% once its own budget and account changes were included, and each extra 10% of spend added about 1.4% to an advertiser's own click prices. The firm's index climbed from 100 in the second quarter of 2025 to 132 in the third quarter of 2026. The report itself is careful: "This is not a controlled experiment, and it can't prove what caused any single price change."

Google's ambitions beyond search drew scrutiny as well. A Search Engine Land analysis by Damien Andell and Olivier de Segonzac, reported by PPC Land, looked inside Dreambeans, the Google Labs app that reads the receipts and then writes the morning story. The app produces a fixed number of illustrated stories each day, drawing on five sources: Search, Workspace, YouTube, Photos and Gemini chats. Stories cite dated evidence, such as a recipe search from September 2025 or an invoice for 5 kg of textured soy protein. Google opened the app to all US accounts over 18 on September 10, 2026. The authors found that "deleting the original information does not automatically delete all the representations already generated from it," and asked the question publishers will recognise: "When a story already provides a personalized answer, what still makes someone want to open the source website?"

Microsoft tidies its console

Away from the outage, Microsoft Advertising shipped housekeeping that advertisers had requested. PPC News Feed reported that Microsoft Advertising is making recommendations less generic, after complaints that earlier suggestions read like boilerplate. "The enhancements aim to ensure recommendations are more selective and provide clearer, account-specific reasoning," the report said, citing Microsoft's November 9 product newsletter. The same newsletter brought breadcrumbs and navigation search to Microsoft Advertising. The navigation menu is now organised around tasks, breadcrumbs show where a user sits in the account and campaign hierarchy, and filters display active segments, support OR logic and keep saved views across the platform. The changes follow a redesigned navigation in August and custom columns in October.

Television's trust deficit

Connected television has the attention advertisers want, but not yet the confidence. On November 12, CIMM published a study, co-sponsored by FreeWheel and OpenX, showing that silence in the bidstream sends 62% of CTV buyers elsewhere. When required signals are missing, 62% of the 50 programmatic buyers surveyed shift spend to another supply path, 54% broaden targeting and 46% lower bids. Only 8% said their DSPs always act on the signals they require. With detailed signals on a verified path, 88% rated their bid likelihood highly, against 36% on an unverified one. CIMM proposes a voluntary minimum trading baseline covering inventory identity and selling authority, to be tested in an industry pilot. "Rich signals only matter when the path underneath them can be trusted," said Erika Loberg of OpenX.

AdExchanger heard the same message from sellers at a LUMA Partners summit, where the conclusion was that CTV has trust issues. Serge Matta, president of global ad sales at LG Ad Solutions, said that about four months ago he offered a large quick-service restaurant chain a deal to pay only for incremental store visits, measured by the advertiser's own third-party provider. The chief marketing officer asked how he could trust LG, and Matta dropped the pitch. "We're not there yet," he said. Vinny Rinaldi of The Trade Desk, a former Hershey's executive, described October as Hershey's Super Bowl: he wanted 95% of spend in the final week before Halloween, yet direct buys delivered most impressions in the first week.

Even the quality of the stream shapes how ads are judged. FreeWheel's Viewer Experience Lab combined a June lab study of 282 sports viewers with a survey of 8,750 and found that when the stream stutters, the ad takes the blame. Technical faults around breaks made three times as many viewers rate ads as intrusive. Negative facial expressions rose 97% with transition artifacts, 84% with latency and 170% with "we'll be right back" slates, compared with seamless streams. "When these challenges become visible, an ad delivery issue becomes a viewing issue," the report said. The study measured no recall or sales.

Attention vendors keep pressing their own answer. Channel Factory, the contextual advertising company, said it will wire xpln.ai attention measurement into its campaigns, centred on Ideal Attention Time, an estimate of how much attention a creative needs before audiences recognise brand, product and message. At its July launch, xpln.ai said 75% of impressions in campaigns it evaluated lacked enough attention to link product and brand. "Integrating xpln.ai's attention measurement technology allows our clients to move beyond basic viewability," said Dave Hompe of Channel Factory. The announcement offered no figures, clients or prices.

The midterm elections left their own mark on streaming. Adweek reported that election advertising drove nearly 10% of viewers to seek ad-free options, in a Savanta survey of nearly 1,800 US adults. Some upgraded to ad-free tiers, which helps streamers; others cancelled or tuned out, which does not. "People will always try to find ways to avoid advertising," said Shaun Austin of Savanta. Broadcast morning television still earns well. NBC News extended Savannah Guthrie's contract at Today, whose 7 to 9 a.m. block generated nearly $203.5 million in ad revenue in 2025, Guideline estimated. NBC News also cancelled Stay Tuned, its streaming primetime news show.

Local sports sit at the centre of this shift. In a Digiday interview, Playfly's chief executive explained why leagues are looking to consolidate local sports rights. Craig Sloan, whose firm represents 83 NBA, NHL and MLB teams, said cable penetration has fallen below 40% of TV homes, and the bankruptcy of Main Street Sports Group earlier this year forced 20 NBA and NHL teams to change partners. The leagues are weighing a centralised platform for local rights, with the NBA possibly moving first. Sloan remains confident about demand: "At the end of the day, the games will always be on." His prediction for a growth category was specific: "Women's volleyball is going to explode."

The brain behind the buy

At LUMA's Digital Marketing Summit in New York on November 9, the argument was that AI is turning ad tech into a fight for the brain behind the buy. Digiday reported that LUMA chief executive Terry Kawaja and partner Conor McKenna see advantage shifting from running campaigns to deciding them in real time: which signals, which creative, which placement. Kawaja put efficiency gains at about 10% and the difference from effectiveness at ten times. "The workflow moat begins to evaporate with the AI technology that is coming out," McKenna said. Ravi Patel of SWYM.ai noted that Google, Meta and Amazon still make impression-level decisions inside their own walls, so outside platforms can steer budgets but not individual impressions.

Mobile is one place where money is moving. Liftoff, the mobile growth platform, reported its second quarterly results as a public company, and AdExchanger reported that Liftoff sees big wins ahead for mobile as AI pushes budgets into apps. Third-quarter revenue reached $237.5 million, up from $179.5 million a year earlier, and profit was $86.7 million against a loss a year before. Shares rose almost 25% overnight. Chief executive Jeremy Bondy said new apps on Apple's App Store doubled in the first half of 2026 to roughly 560,000, many built with AI, and argued that AI search is pushing businesses toward their own apps. "As a reminder, our business is capital light," he said, with third-quarter capital spending at about $14 million.

Holiday shelves

Retailers and platforms are lining up new inventory for the season. Adweek reported that Lyft is testing a prominent new ad placement called the home masthead, which gives a brand near-full ownership of the screen riders see before booking. Pluto TV and Google Cloud are among the first sponsors. Mattel, meanwhile, is bringing Barbie and Hot Wheels to TikTok Shop in its first direct selling on the platform, starting with about 20 products and planning more than 40. Because TikTok users must be at least 13, the store targets parents and adult collectors. "Little kids are not going to purchase products for themselves," said Mina Zandbar, Mattel's vice president of global e-commerce. Mattel's third-quarter net sales rose 4% to $1.807 billion.

Marketers are cautiously upbeat. A Digiday+ Research survey of 90 brand and retailer professionals found that marketers expect holiday revenue to grow despite economic pressures: 76% expect growth over 2025 and 81% expect discounting to match last year. "Spending is resilient," said Laura Brodie of Ritual. Ari Bloom of A-Frame Brands was less sanguine: "It is getting brutal out there." At Target, new chief marketing officer Mark Weinstein, two months into the job after 16 years at Hilton, said the brand needs to get its edge back, promising more collaborations, curation and low-price luxuries.

Grocery prices drew a regulator in Australia. On November 13 the ACCC named eight grocery categories at Coles and Woolworths for margin monitoring: potatoes, limes, bone-in chicken, fresh milk, bread rolls, chocolate, coffee and kitchen sponges, covering more than 1,000 items. The two chains are the only retailers covered by the excessive pricing prohibition in force since July 1. "It signals that we think the pricing of the product warrants closer examination," said Deputy Chair Mick Keogh, adding that inclusion does not mean unreasonable margins are suspected.

Creators and the long game

Platforms keep chasing short video. At TwitchCon in San Diego, Twitch said it will let creators upload short-form videos made elsewhere, hoping to drive discovery back to livestreams, where about 70% of creator earnings come directly from fans. "We're not trying to be TwitchTok," said chief product officer Mike Minton. Some streamers doubted viewers would watch clips natively, and one agency executive called the move an inventory grab.

Guinness is going the other way. Digiday reported on Guinness's go-slow approach to creators, with global marketing manager Paddy Carberry explaining that signing creators en masse would make the brand look out of step: "all of a sudden we become the dad dancing at the disco." Much of the brand's recent buzz, from "splitting the G" to London pint-rating accounts, came unpaid. UK rules also bind it: Guinness cannot advertise where more than a quarter of the audience is under 18, which is hard to guarantee on TikTok.

Craft and longevity filled out the day. Sonsie, the skincare brand majority owned by Pamela Anderson, released its first holiday film, an 83-second stop-motion piece that took eight months and 23 creators. And the Brand Hall of Fame named Home Depot, ESPN, Disney, Budweiser and Chick-fil-A among its 2026 inductees, chosen from 100 nominees against 10 criteria for sustained success. At the same gala, The One Club for Creativity made Apple the first brand in its Creative Hall of Fame. "Every brand in this room has been tested by decades of change and is still here," said Mandy Balak of The Gathering Festival.

The week ended with a reminder that scale cuts both ways. A single Microsoft fault interrupted mail, calendars and AI assistants across continents, while eBay, Apple and the browser makers argued over who controls the agents and prompts that sit between people and what they buy. The survey numbers suggest users want to keep their hands on the wheel. The platforms are still deciding how much wheel to give them.

Did you know

Downdetector, the outage tracker everyone checked on Thursday, was founded in April 2012 by Tom Sanders and Sander van de Graaf. It flags an incident when user reports rise well above the normal volume for that time of day, and it has belonged to Accenture since June 17, 2026, when Accenture closed a $1.2 billion purchase of the Ookla package.

Exchange Online, the service that failed this week, left beta and went on sale in the United States on November 17, 2008. It hosts organisations' mailboxes in Microsoft datacenters, and in January 2026 Microsoft said paid Microsoft 365 commercial seats had passed 450 million.

A shopper agent is an AI agent that a retailer runs on its own site or app, answering from its own catalogue, prices and order data. That separates it from the personal agents consumers send out, like the ones eBay now turns away. Salesforce made its Shopper Agent generally available on July 6, 2026.

B2A, short for business-to-agent, describes companies whose immediate customer is an AI agent buying for a person. No standards body defines the term. One sobering data point: Ahrefs found in May 2026 that 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all.

Signal loss is the industry's name for the shrinking supply of cookies, device IDs, click IDs and consent that ads rely on. When Apple's App Tracking Transparency took effect with iOS 14.5 on April 26, 2021, one study estimated the share of trackable US users fell from 72.6% to 17.9%, which is why Germany's new re-ask rule matters.