A disruption to Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot spread into Asia-Pacific business hours on Friday after affecting thousands of users in the United States, Reuters reported. The outage hit government agencies in Australia, Japan and the US, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft blamed problems with its servers. In its latest update, it said adjustments it had made to the affected servers had not led to a sustained recovery, although some regions had partly recovered. “We’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” the company said on X.
The outage had lasted about 12 hours. Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at its peak, at around 1pm ET on Thursday. By 11.30pm ET (04:30 GMT), there were still more than 18,000 reports. Early on Friday local time, Downdetector also showed outages of several Microsoft services across Asia-Pacific, including in India, Australia and Japan.
It is the second disruption to Microsoft’s 365 services this year, after an outage in January. The services were also disrupted in October last year. The repeated failures have raised concern that corporate clients could start to question the company’s reliability.
In a service health notice, Microsoft said that features of Microsoft 365 which depend on Exchange Online and email were affected, while those that do not rely on Exchange Online were still working. Exchange Online is the company’s cloud-based platform for email, calendars, contacts and tasks. Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the outage.
Governments affected
Tony Burke, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, said Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack. He told a press conference that the company believed the problem was similar in some ways to the CrowdStrike incident, involving “an update that has gone awry”, and that the impact was mainly on email systems.
Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organisations affected on Friday. The CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024 was one of the largest internet disruptions on record. It crippled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports.
The US House of Representatives said its users had been affected and that its engineers were working with Microsoft. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the outage was affecting the government’s information system infrastructure.
Businesses disrupted
OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced problems with Microsoft connectors. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services had been affected.
In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. A source familiar with the situation told Reuters that one company cancelled a bond repurchase agreement it had already scheduled. The source declined to name the company.
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter results from 12 November to 16 November. It cited business disruption caused by the global Microsoft outage.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at the trading platform eToro, said investors were likely to look past the outage, because “very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight”. However, he warned that if reliability became a recurring problem, IT departments would think twice before relying more heavily on a single provider. He added that the market would want to see Microsoft prove its reliability before asking customers to spend more on Copilot.
Last month, Microsoft also reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform, which affected its productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
(Reuters)
