Microsoft 365 Outage Knocks Out Outlook and Teams Worldwide
Government agencies, courts and companies including OpenAI were caught up in the disruption. Microsoft says it was not a cyberattack, but its fixes have not yet held.
REDMOND, Washington, Nov 13- A Microsoft 365 outage left millions of people without email on Friday. It started in the United States on Thursday. By Friday morning in Asia, it was still going.
The outage had run for about 12 hours at last count. Microsoft said it still had no lasting fix.
The damage was wide. In Australia, it hit local councils and state agencies. It hit federal agencies, courts and schools. Many of them told the public they could not be reached by email. The country’s spy agency was caught up in it. So were its federal police.
It was felt in Japan, too. A senior government spokesman said it was hurting the state’s computer systems. And in Washington, the House of Representatives said its staff had been hit. It said its own tech team was working with Microsoft to sort it out.
Firms had trouble as well. OpenAI and Anthropic, two big names in artificial intelligence, said the tools that link them to Microsoft had broken down.
Two airlines in India, IndiGo and Akasa Air, said their email help lines were down. In Taiwan, it slowed work at banks, insurers and fund firms. One firm even called off a bond deal it had set up, a source told Reuters.
One company put off its results. Workhorse Group, which makes electric trucks, moved them from November 12 to November 16. It said the outage had got in the way of its work.
It all began on Thursday afternoon, New York time. At the worst point, the site Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States alone.
Later, the reports came from India, Australia and Japan.
Microsoft says it was a change to its own settings. That change put too much load on some of its servers, and they went down. Then the work those servers had been doing moved to the ones that were still up. And then those started to fail as well.
Engineers tried to bring the servers back. But each time traffic came back to them, they stopped working again. So the company had to try other ways. It let less traffic through to some servers. It also put some of them back on an older setup.
By early Friday, it had found where most of the trouble lay. It was in Exchange Online, the service that runs Outlook mail, calendars and contacts.
Teams chats and calls were mostly back by then. Tools that don’t use Exchange had kept working all along, Microsoft said. Still, the fix had not held. In its latest update, Microsoft said its changes had not brought a lasting recovery. It said some places were doing a little better.
“We’re reviewing what additional actions we can take,” the company said on social media, and that they were not aware of any attack.
Tony Burke, Australia’s minister for home affairs and cyber security, said the same. He said Microsoft did not think it was a cyberattack. He said it was more like the CrowdStrike failure in 2024. That year, a bad update knocked out computers at hospitals, banks and airports around the world.
This time, he said, the hit was “very much on email systems.”
It is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year. One occurred in January, and another in October last year. Last month, a failure in Microsoft’s Azure cloud also affected its office tools.
Josh Gilbert, an analyst at the trading site eToro, said investors are unlikely to be concerned yet because few customers can easily switch away from Microsoft.
“Investors will take this in their stride for now,” he said, adding that if the outages continue, companies may reconsider putting even more of their work with one provider.
Mark Gregory, who teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne, said firms must thoroughly test updates before releasing them.
