Microsoft races to fix Outlook on one of its longest outages

REDMOND, Washington – Microsoft is struggling to restore access to its flagship software and end an outage that has paralysed government offices, traders and businesses globally.

Disruptions for Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool continued into a second day on Nov 13 as Microsoft struggled to restore services. Previous disruptions have rarely lasted more than several hours.

The company has provided near hourly updates of its efforts to fix its malfunctioning systems and route user traffic away from affected servers.

It said an investigation into the incident has found “a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss”. The cause was not obviously malicious, it added.

Microsoft said in a status update on Nov 13 that it was seeing “positive signs for server stability”, though services have not been restored.

The outage shows the ubiquity of Microsoft’s e-mail, chat and corporate software and is another example of the risks of having a single point of failure on the internet.

While most technology glitches are fixed quickly, faulty updates and server troubles at one key technology provider can ripple across the global economy.

A 15-hour disruption at Amazon Web Services in 2025 hit hundreds of websites. A faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings in 2024 grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.

Users in more than 70 countries reported problems accessing Microsoft’s products, according to Downdetector, which recorded hundreds of thousands of complaints.

Cybersecurity software, file-sharing services and administrator tools, were also disrupted. The company sells those products, along with workplace staples like Word and Excel, in a bundle under the M365 brand.

In Singapore, Downdetector began recording reports at about 2am overnight, with numbers continuing to climb on the morning of Nov 13.

As at 9.15am, there were 1,130 outage reports for Microsoft Outlook, up from about 730 an hour earlier.

Outage reports for Microsoft 365 were also on the rise, climbing from 434 at 8.30am to 566 at 9.20am.

Dozens of users here also reported issues with Microsoft Teams and Copilot.

In Europe, stock exchange operator Euronext said its listing teams were experiencing e-mail communication issues, while Britain’s insurer Aviva said it was putting backup plans in place for its earnings calls. Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers of delays to e-mails and updates.

American AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they faced issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo , Akasa Air and Air India said their e-mail support services were impacted.

The outage also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. One of the companies went as far as cancelling a bond repurchase transaction, a source familiar with the situation said.

Another Taiwanese financial company resorted to using fax to confirm trades, a second source said.

In the US, electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its results on Nov 12 to Nov 16, while Switzerland’s Richemont briefly delayed its first half results announcement on Friday.

Black eye on Microsoft

It is the second disruption to hit Microsoft’s 365 services in 2026.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely deal with the outage for now because few customers can walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight.

“The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands,” he said.

Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January 2026 and also in October 2025. In October, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack.

“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said at a press conference.

“The impact that they are dealing with... is very much on e-mail systems,” the minister added.

Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among organisations caught up in the outage on Nov 13.

The Government Technology Agency of Singapore said that some government systems in the country had also been affected by the service disruption.

The US House of Representatives said the outage had impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft.

Microsoft earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable and said it was not driven by an increase in traffic.

It then said the restored servers remained stable so far, and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.

“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a previous statement.

At 6pm ET (Nov 13, 7am Singapore time), Microsoft had said it observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected their servers. REUTERS