A major outage affecting Microsoft 365, which began on 12 November, has now lasted for over 12 hours and has affected users in various parts of the world. Problems have arisen with Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other enterprise services. According to Reuters, the disruption has affected government agencies in the US, Australia and Japan, as well as airlines and tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft is attempting to restore server operations, but initial technical fixes have not yielded stable results.
- A global Microsoft 365 outage has disrupted the operation of Outlook, Teams and Copilot.
- At its peak, Downdetector recorded over 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook.
- The disruptions affected government departments, airlines and artificial intelligence developers.
- Microsoft has partially restored its services, but has not yet managed to resolve the issue completely.
The Microsoft outage has affected dozens of countries and has been ongoing for more than 12 hours
Problems with access to Microsoft 365 began on the afternoon of 12 November, US time. Users complained en masse that they were unable to access their email, send messages or use corporate applications.
According to the Downdetector service, at around 13:00 US Eastern Time, the number of reports of Outlook outages had exceeded 130,000. By 23:30, this figure had fallen to approximately 18,000, although the service continued to experience intermittent disruptions.
On Friday, 13 November, the problems spread to working hours in the Asia-Pacific region. Users in Australia, India, Japan and other countries reported service disruptions.
The outage affected the US, Australian and Japanese governments, as well as OpenAI
Government bodies in several countries were affected by the technical fault. In Australia, disruptions were reported within the federal police force and the intelligence agency. In the US, problems arose in the House of Representatives, whilst in Japan, government IT systems were affected.
Companies OpenAI and Anthropic have reported issues with their Microsoft 365 integrations. Due to a glitch, certain tools for connecting to corporate services have stopped working properly.
The Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air have experienced problems with their customer support email systems. In Taiwan, the disruption has affected the operations of financial institutions. One market participant even cancelled a planned bond buyback transaction.
Workhorse Group, an American manufacturer of electric forklifts, has postponed the publication of its financial results from 12 to 16 November due to a disruption to its business systems.
Microsoft is trying to restore its servers and has ruled out any signs of a cyberattack
According to the company, the main issues relate to the infrastructure of Exchange Online — the cloud platform that provides email, calendars and other Microsoft 365 business features.
Engineers have discovered that some of the servers stop responding once the load is restored. The company is redistributing traffic, adjusting infrastructure settings and gradually bringing the equipment back online.
On the morning of 13 November Microsoft reported some positive results in stabilising the servers. At the same time, problems with the availability of certain services persisted.
The company stated that there are currently no indications of malicious activity that could have caused the outage. In January 2026, Microsoft 365 had already experienced a major service disruption, and these repeated incidents have once again raised questions about the reliability of the cloud infrastructure on which companies and government organisations around the world rely.
