Microsoft said it was making progress restoring Microsoft 365 services after a worldwide outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot. (Foto: Instagram)
Microsoft said Friday, Nov. 13, that it had made encouraging progress restoring services in Europe after a worldwide outage disrupted Microsoft 365, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool. Businesses, government agencies and individual users were still affected, the company said, as it worked to bring systems back online.
The company reported improved service availability and email delivery across a growing portion of the affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. It said Japan remained comparatively stable and conditions in North America were improving, but warned that some customers could continue to experience intermittent problems. In the Asia-Pacific region, Microsoft said recovery work had been completed on parts of the affected infrastructure and that traffic was gradually returning. The company also reported improvements in access to inboxes and the processing of delayed messages.
The outage began at about 3 p.m. Brasilia time on Thursday, Nov. 12. It initially affected users concentrated in the United States before spreading across Asia-Pacific and Europe overnight. Microsoft said it had no indication that malicious activity caused the incident, and the company said it would publish a post-incident report covering the root cause, corrective measures and security improvements once the problem was mitigated. Microsoft suggested that configuration issues involving servers operating Microsoft 365 may have contributed to the disruption.
The company said early repair efforts had not initially produced the expected results in restoring data traffic. It later reported better server stability after applying a patch to an authentication and routing configuration component in part of its infrastructure. Microsoft said it was monitoring the results and planned to extend the measure to servers supporting regions returning to service. The outage affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as private companies. Operations at artificial intelligence developers OpenAI and Anthropic were also disrupted.
The effects extended to essential services and day-to-day operations. Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry said the disruption had a “significant impact” on activity in the country, described in the report as the world’s fourth-largest economy. Some Japanese government services switched to paper documents, while at least two financial institutions in Hong Kong suspended work Friday morning. In Australia, intelligence agencies and the national police reported operational problems. Local officials and analysts said financial and operational losses there could reach billions of dollars.
Airlines, municipal governments and at least one automaker also reported effects from the outage. European rail services said delays in email delivery affected some passengers’ access to tickets, while members of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service reported a serious impact on ambulance services. In Brazil, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) said its institutional email and Teams were among the tools that went down. The court said its other systems continued operating normally, without disrupting judicial activities, including hearings conducted through its virtual plenary.
