“The modifications applied for improve the maintenabilité du service … do not produce the expected effects,” Microsoft said on X as a massive server failure disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot across multiple continents on Friday, November 13.
Thousands of users across the United States and international markets experienced severe disruptions to Microsoft 365 services, according to L’Express.fr. The technical failure marked the second major interruption for the cloud platform this year.
State administrations in Australia, Japan, and the United States reported disruptions. Artificial intelligence firms OpenAI and Anthropic also experienced connection issues.
Australian Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security Tony Burke said that Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack. “They believe they are facing a situation comparable, in some respects, to what we experienced with CrowdStrike, which is an update that went wrong,” Burke said during a press conference.
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 problem reports regarding Outlook in the United States at the peak of the disruption on Thursday around 1:00 p.m. New York time. By 11:30 p.m. New York time on Friday, more than 18,000 incidents remained active.
The outage affected features of Microsoft 365 relying on Exchange Online and email messaging, while independent features remained operational, according to Microsoft service status notices. Exchange Online manages cloud emails, calendars, contacts, and tasks.
Microsoft reported no malicious activity behind the incident. The failure impacted state information systems in Japan, while New Zealand confirmed that all its embassies, consulates, and representations faced technical disruptions.
In India, airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported email customer service failures. At Taiwan, fund management at brokerages, life insurers, and collective investment schemes suffered delays.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, said that investors are likely to absorb the immediate shock because corporate clients cannot easily exit the Microsoft ecosystem. However, he warned that recurring reliability issues could eventually damage the company’s standing.
“The real risk is that this is not the first 365 outage this year,” Gilbert said. “If lack of reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, every IT department will have a good reason to think twice before trusting an even larger share of its business to a single supplier.”
Microsoft previously experienced Microsoft 365 outages in January and in October of the previous year. An Azure cloud platform outage last month also impacted office suites and various global industries.
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