Microsoft outage ends with Outlook and Teams restored
Microsoft says its email and meeting tools are back after a global disruption that lasted more than a day. The company found no sign of an attack
REDMOND, Washington, Nov 14 – The Microsoft outage that kept millions of people out of their email for more than a day is over, the company said on Saturday.
Microsoft said Teams, Outlook and the rest of its products were back to normal. In a post on X, it said it had “restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions.”
The outage lasted more than 24 hours, making it one of the longest in the company’s history.
It began on Thursday, with reports of problems rising around 17:25 Greenwich Mean Time, according to Ookla, the company that owns the tracking site Downdetector. The reports continued to increase as people went to work, first in Asia and then in Europe.
Downdetector received more than 7.4 million reports in total. At one point, it was receiving nearly 20,000 reports per minute.
Microsoft said the problem was with its servers. It said it had seen no sign that anyone attacked it, and that artificial intelligence was not to blame.
The outage hit one part of Microsoft in particular. That part is Exchange Online, which runs email and calendars in the cloud. Apps that do not use it continued to work, while firms running Microsoft on their own servers rather than in the cloud were mostly unaffected.
But for a lot of people, that one part was the whole day. They could not send email. They could not see their calendars. They could not join Team calls.
Luke Kehoe, an analyst at Ookla, said the outage showed “how much of the working day now runs through one provider’s email.”
It was not just offices. The outage also hit governments, from Australia and Japan to the United States.
In the United Kingdom, it hit the National Health Service and the Metropolitan Police in London. The government said it was working with Microsoft to fix it.
The police said that for a time, people could not report some crimes online, but calls to the police still got through. Some health services went back to paper.
In Australia, the outage hit the spy agency and the federal police. Tony Burke, the minister for cyber security, said Microsoft did not think it was a cyberattack.
Firms around the world had to find a way around it.
Euronext, which runs stock markets in Europe, had problems with its email. Aviva, the British insurer, used a backup for its calls on results. Maersk, the Danish shipping firm, told its customers that its updates would come late.
In India, the airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said their email help lines were down. OpenAI and Anthropic, two U.S.-based artificial intelligence firms, also experienced problems with their connections to Microsoft, which were later resolved.
In Taiwan, the outage disrupted firms that manage money, according to people familiar with the matter. One firm called off a deal to buy back bonds.
Another one went back to using a fax machine to confirm its trades.
Some firms had to put off their results. Workhorse Group, which makes electric trucks in the United States, moved its results from Thursday to November 16. Richemont, in Switzerland, held back its results for a short time on Friday.
This is not Microsoft’s first outage of the year. In January, another disruption affected key services including Outlook, Microsoft Defender, Teams, SharePoint Online and Purview.
Last month, an outage in its Azure cloud also affected its office tools.
Josh Gilbert, an analyst at the trading site eToro, said that is the bigger worry. He said that if the outages keep coming, firms may think twice before they put more of their work with just one company.
Still, it is not easy to leave Microsoft. Some analysts say its tools are so much a part of the working day that most firms will stay.
The outage could also result in numerous insurance claims, but the cost to insurers is not expected to be excessive, said Mario De Cicco of Morningstar DBRS. He said losses covered by insurers could total between $300 million and $500 million.
That is less than the CrowdStrike outage in 2024, which disrupted more than 8 million Windows-based computers and cost between $400 million and $1.5 billion.
Microsoft shares closed at $523.88 on Friday, unchanged from the previous day.
