Microsoft restores all 365 services after global outage spanning 74 countries

Microsoft said Saturday, November 14, that all affected Microsoft 365 services and regions were fully restored after outage reports reached 74 countries and territories in under sixty minutes.

The disruption knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot, and Exchange Online problems affected connected features. Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, with volume peaking near 20,000 per minute and topping nearly 200,000 at the worst point, a level more than 1,500 times normal. According to Ookla, reports began rising at about 1725 GMT on Thursday.

Users started reporting problems at about 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, November 12, with issues appearing around midday in the U.S. and at 6 p.m. in the U.K. Downdetector counted reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories, and the outage lasted for hours across more than 70 countries, persisting for more than a day. Some users still faced intermittent access problems and e-mail delivery delays on Friday, November 13.

Microsoft said server and infrastructure problems kept users from connecting to its services, while initial updates described elevated load across parts of the infrastructure. Microsoft said the outage came from a problem that surfaced during an earlier network capacity upgrade after a recent network change, and Exchange Online problems took down Outlook, Teams and Copilot while other applications kept working.

Microsoft said it found no evidence of malicious activity and ruled out a cyberattack. The company added that the disruption was not tied to a cyber incident or AI agents.

Government bodies, courts, health services, companies, airlines and banks felt the impact across many locations. Officials in Japan, Singapore and Australia said the hours-long disruption affected government operations, and officials in Greece and Norway reported problems including e-mail for certain ministries.

Hospital staff in Britain used paper records, while courtrooms searched for fax machines, and Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home from a Manchester trial because of delays. British police said they could not receive online crime reports and asked the public to call for urgent matters, and the disruption affected the National Health Service, with doctors at risk of being unable to send prescriptions to pharmacies by e-mail.

Arapahoe County, Colorado’s sheriff’s office said the disruption affected online bond payments, the National Pharmacy Association told customers to expect medication delays, and disruptions also hit some banks in Hong Kong. Danny Lau, a Hong Kong businessperson who runs an aluminum company, said he could not receive updates from U.S. customers through Outlook.

IndiGo and Akasa Air reported e-mail disruptions for customer support in India, and Air India changed its communication routing. Ticketing delays hit rail services in Canada and Europe, and Workhorse Group, a U.S.-listed electric truckmaker, delayed its quarterly earnings call because of the communication breakdown.

OpenAI and Anthropic reported difficulty connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, and companies running Microsoft services on their own servers were less affected.

Microsoft apologized on Friday and said restoration happened gradually, making the process take longer. The company pointed customers to MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates, said e-mail backlogs had cleared, and said service health was returning to normal across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Microsoft said on its status page and on X that the fix was complete and service had returned for all remaining affected customers and regions. Microsoft said it would keep monitoring enterprise systems to find and fix any remaining problems.

Microsoft shares fell roughly 2.5% to 3% before the market opened on Friday but finished up 0.17% at $523.88, and the stock is up about 8% since the start of the year. Microsoft 365 has more than 430 million users, and the company reported in January that paid commercial subscriptions numbered more than 450 million.

This was Microsoft’s second service disruption of the year, following a January outage involving its 365 services, another disruption in October of the previous year and an Azure cloud platform outage last month. Posts on Microsoft 365’s X account suggested engineers struggled for some time to get the problem under control.

The disruptions illustrate cascading problems when many platforms rely on the same provider. In the U.K., concerns arose about depending on too few technology companies, and lawmakers outside the United States said the outage shows the consequences of relying too heavily on American technology. Tim Clement-Jones, former chair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, called it an “I told you so moment.”