Microsoft outage disrupts email, businesses and government services worldwide

Microsoft was still working Friday, November 13, to resolve a widespread outage that disrupted email and other services for users, companies and government agencies from Asia to the United States. Users reported problems with Outlook, Teams and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot as the disruption continued for hours.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said early Friday that the incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 products connected to Exchange Online and its email services. Microsoft was testing different approaches to determine the cause and restore its servers. It said it had found no indication of malicious activity and would give the incident urgent attention until services were fully restored.

More than 130,000 users reported difficulty accessing Outlook through the outage tracking service Downdetector earlier Thursday. New reports later declined from that peak, but Microsoft's recovery remained incomplete. Hours after announcing that service health and functionality had been restored, the company revised its list of affected services and said work was continuing. Its latest update described recovery proceeding in phases, with service performance still varying and capacity remaining below normal levels.

The disruption also reached other technology platforms. OpenAI and Anthropic both reported difficulties connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, illustrating how problems can spread when people use AI services to work with software from other companies. In the United States, industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. postponed a quarterly earnings conference call because of the outage.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that he had discussed the disruption with Microsoft's leading executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator. Speaking to reporters in Sydney, Burke said Microsoft believed the problem involved an update that had gone wrong, drawing a comparison with the CrowdStrike incident rather than a cyberattack. In July 2024, Texas-based CrowdStrike blamed an update bug for sending faulty data to millions of customer computers. That outage grounded flights, interrupted television broadcasts and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.

Businesses in Asia described interruptions to customer communications. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who operates an aluminum company, said its Outlook accounts could not receive updates from U.S. customers. A prolonged disruption could affect production schedules, he said. Air India temporarily redirected its email services so customer inquiries could continue reaching the airline, while reporting no effect on flight operations. IndiGo also reported email support disruptions that affected incoming customer inquiries. It said its other support channels and flight operations remained operational.

Government agencies reported problems as well. Singapore's Government Technology Agency said government email services were unavailable and that it was working with Microsoft on a resolution. The Supreme Court of the Philippines said the Microsoft 365 outage had disrupted some operations, including its ability to respond by email.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said government information technology infrastructure had been affected and officials were monitoring developments closely. Microsoft's latest assessment indicated that recovery efforts were continuing across the affected infrastructure, with full capacity yet to return.