Microsoft Apologizes After a Global Outage Hits 70+ Countries
Outlook, Teams and Copilot are back online after a disruption that lasted more than a day and reached governments, airlines and courts around the world.
Black News 
For more than 24 hours this week, professionals around the world opened Outlook and found that emails weren’t arriving and their own messages weren’t going out. Microsoft now says the problem is fixed, and the company has publicly apologized.
Microsoft first reported technical issues at around 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, November 12. Within hours, Downdetector had logged more than 130,000 reports, and users in more than 70 countries and territories said they couldn’t reliably reach Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and the company’s AI assistant, Copilot. Early Saturday morning, Microsoft announced that it had fixed the underlying issue and restored service to the last affected customers and regions.
On Thursday night, Microsoft explained that a process on its servers that establishes secure connections had become overwhelmed, and the servers stopped handling requests. In a later statement, the company said the problem came from an earlier network capacity upgrade and surfaced after a recent network change. Microsoft said the outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack and had nothing to do with AI agents. Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs, Tony Burke, said Microsoft compared the incident to the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage and described it as an update that went wrong.
The effects reached well beyond office inboxes. Air India rerouted its email so customer questions could keep coming in, and IndiGo had disruptions to its email support, though its flights ran as normal. The Supreme Court of the Philippines said some of its operations were affected, including responding to email. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency reported government email outages, Japan’s government said its IT infrastructure was impacted, and government offices in Detroit were also hit. The commercial electric vehicle maker Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly earnings call. AI companies felt it too: OpenAI and Anthropic both reported trouble connecting to Microsoft 365 tools.
Recovery was slower than usual. Microsoft restarted the affected servers and brought services back in stages, checking that each stage was stable before moving to the next. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said recovery was harder than normal because the team ran into technical challenges and failure modes along the way. By Friday morning Eastern time, Microsoft said its email backlog was close to normal levels.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said on Friday.
As of Saturday, Microsoft says all service has been restored. The company plans to publish a full post-incident report that lays out the timeline and the fixes it will make. Anyone still having problems can check the Microsoft 365 service status page for updates.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps. For many women who run their own businesses, that’s where client conversations, invoices and contracts live, so a full day without it is a full day of business on hold. This week was a good reminder to keep client contact information somewhere besides your inbox, save the files you can’t work without on your own device, and have another way to reach clients when a platform goes down.
Featured image generated with AI for Bacon Magazine.
