A widespread Microsoft 365 outage has disrupted access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other workplace applications across multiple countries, affecting businesses, government institutions and educational organisations as the technology company struggles to restore its services.
The disruption, which began around midday on Thursday, November 12, in the United States, extended into Friday, November 13, leaving users unable to access email accounts, send and receive messages and use several cloud-based workplace tools.
Other affected services include SharePoint and Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email platform, with applications dependent on Exchange Online experiencing particularly significant disruptions. Some Microsoft 365 features that do not rely on the email platform remained operational.
The scale of the disruption was reflected in reports recorded by Downdetector, an online platform that tracks service interruptions. The platform recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook-related problems at the peak of the outage in the United States, although the figure represents user reports rather than a confirmed number of affected customers.
The incident was also reported across 74 countries and territories, disrupting operations in several sectors, including aviation, education, financial services and government.
In Australia, some businesses were unable to print invoices, while schools experienced difficulties conducting online classes. Court livestreaming services were also affected, prompting some educational institutions to ask parents to report student absences through telephone calls.
The disruption extended to India’s aviation industry, where email support services used by IndiGo and Akasa Air were affected. Some financial institutions in Taiwan also experienced interruptions to fund management activities.
Microsoft connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic were equally affected, disrupting the integration of their artificial intelligence services with Microsoft 365 applications.
Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure loads across multiple regions but subsequently identified the unexpected unavailability of several servers as a major factor behind the incident.
The company explained that the loss of server capacity shifted traffic to the remaining infrastructure, overwhelming core processes and causing additional servers to become unresponsive.
Its recovery efforts included pausing deployments, redirecting traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarting servers. However, some restored servers became unresponsive again after receiving redirected traffic, complicating attempts to stabilise the affected systems.
Microsoft later reported that some servers had returned to service and remained stable, while traffic was being redirected through alternative pathways to reduce pressure on the affected infrastructure.
However, the company acknowledged that its recovery measures had not delivered sustained improvements and was considering additional interventions to restore infrastructure stability.
The company also ruled out indications of malicious activity as the cause of the disruption. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack.
In July 2024, Microsoft investigated another global technical disruption affecting Office applications and cloud services, including Outlook, Word and Excel, which left users experiencing connectivity problems and degraded service performance.
Similarly, an October 2025 outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, disrupted several online platforms, including Snapchat and Canva, following infrastructure problems in its US East Coast region.
In November 2025, a major Cloudflare outage also disrupted millions of websites globally, including Nigerian websites and digital services.
