Microsoft Apologises as Global Outage Disrupts Services in 74 Countries

Microsoft has apologised to customers following a major global outage that disrupted several of its services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, across 74 countries and territories.

The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, affected users across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, leaving many unable to access emails, communicate with colleagues or use essential workplace applications.

The outage monitoring platform Downdetector recorded reports of service disruptions from 74 countries and territories within approximately one hour of the incident.

Outlook was among the worst-affected services, with reports of users experiencing difficulties accessing their mailboxes, sending messages and receiving emails. Microsoft Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, also experienced disruptions.

Other affected services included SharePoint Online, Planner, To Do and some security-related products.

Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated load across parts of its infrastructure. However, the company later explained that several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, forcing the remaining infrastructure to handle additional workloads.

The company said its initial recovery measures were not producing the expected results, prompting engineers to explore alternative solutions to restore services.

In an update on Friday, Microsoft reported early signs of stabilisation and improvements in server capacity, although some users continued experiencing intermittent access and delayed messages.

The company said it was extending email timeout periods to help protect delayed messages while recovery efforts continued.

Microsoft Executive Vice-President Charles Lamanna apologised for the disruption and said there was no indication that the incident resulted from malicious activity or a cyberattack.

The outage also affected government agencies, businesses and other organisations that depend on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. Some healthcare facilities and public services reported communication difficulties.

Technology companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems with services connected to Microsoft 365.

Microsoft has more than 450 million paid commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions, highlighting the potential reach of the disruption.

The company said it would continue working to restore normal operations and promised to publish a detailed report explaining the root cause of the incident and measures to prevent a recurrence.