Microsoft Outage Spreads to Asia Pacific as Recovery Efforts Fall Short

A widespread outage of Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, extended into Asia Pacific business hours on Friday after disrupting thousands of users in the United States, as the company worked to resolve server problems it identified as the cause.

The disruption reached government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, along with companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It marks the second outage of Microsoft's 365 services this year, fueling concerns that repeated failures could lead corporate customers to question the company's reliability.

Microsoft said in its latest update that adjustments made to the affected servers had not produced a sustained recovery, though it observed partial improvement in regions where the changes were applied. "We're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability," the company said on X.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collecting status reports from multiple sources, recorded more than 18,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at 11:30 p.m. ET. It also showed disruptions to several Microsoft services across India, Australia and Japan early Friday local time. At its peak around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, reports of Outlook problems in the US exceeded 130,000, and the outage lasted roughly 12 hours.

In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 that depend on Exchange Online, its cloud based platform for email, calendar, contacts and tasks, were affected, while components that do not rely on it remained functional. The company added that it was "not aware" of any malicious activity behind the disruption.

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was not facing a cyberattack. "They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke told a press conference, adding that the impact was "very much on email systems." Australia's spy agency and federal police were among the organizations caught up in the outage. The 2024 CrowdStrike malfunction, one of the largest internet disruptions on record, crippled systems at hospitals, banks and airports.

In the United States, the House of Representatives said the outage affected its users and that its engineers were working with Microsoft. Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters the disruption was affecting the government's information system infrastructure.

The fallout reached businesses across sectors. OpenAI and Anthropic said they experienced problems with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported that their email support services were hit. In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies, and one company canceled a bond repurchase agreement transaction it had already scheduled, according to a source familiar with the matter who declined to name the firm.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely shrug off the incident but warned that repeated disruptions could take a toll. "The bigger worry is that this isn't the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands," he said.

Microsoft previously suffered 365 outages in January of this year and in October of last year, and reported an Azure cloud platform outage last month that disrupted industries worldwide. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which had been due to report third quarter results on November 12, pushed the release to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global outage.