Microsoft is restoring Outlook, Teams and Copilot after a global outage disrupted businesses, government agencies and public services across the United States, Europe and Asia for a day.
WEBDESK – MEDIABITES
A major global outage affecting Microsoft’s cloud-based services has disrupted businesses, government agencies, and millions of users across several countries as the technology giant works to restore its systems after widespread technical problems.
The disruption, which began on Thursday and continued into Friday, November 13, affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and Exchange Online. Users reported difficulties accessing email accounts, sending and receiving messages, and using workplace applications.
Microsoft said it was making progress in restoring services, with availability and email delivery improving across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. However, some customers continued experiencing intermittent connectivity problems and delays as engineers worked to repair affected infrastructure and clear email backlogs.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook in the United States shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. Thousands of additional reports involved Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 applications.
The disruption extended beyond individual users, affecting government institutions and businesses that depend on Microsoft’s technology for daily operations.
In Japan, government officials confirmed that the outage had affected the country’s information technology infrastructure. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency reported problems with government email services, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court said some of its operations, including email responses, had been disrupted.
In Britain, the outage halted a trial in Manchester, disrupted online police crime reporting and raised concerns about possible delays in prescription services. Norwegian ministries also experienced disruptions.
Several companies across Asia reported email and customer-support problems, although airlines said their flight operations were not affected.
The outage also affected Microsoft 365 connections used by artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic, disrupting some tools that rely on Microsoft’s services.
Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, said its engineers were pursuing multiple recovery measures, including repairing affected servers, adjusting network configurations, and gradually restoring traffic across its infrastructure.
The company said its investigation had identified a problem involving server processes responsible for establishing secure connections. These processes were becoming overwhelmed, causing affected servers to stop responding to requests.
Microsoft has not established a definitive root cause of the outage and said it had found no indication that malicious activity or a cyberattack was responsible.
The incident has renewed concerns about the world’s growing dependence on a handful of major technology providers. Businesses, media organizations, government departments and educational institutions increasingly rely on cloud-based platforms for communication, collaboration and data management.
For users in Pakistan and the United States, the disruption highlights the importance of maintaining alternative communication channels and backup systems when essential digital services become unavailable.
Microsoft said it would continue recovery operations until the affected services were fully restored, while warning that some users could continue experiencing intermittent problems.
Source: Associated Press. Read the AP report.
