LONDON: A major disruption to Microsoft’s cloud-based services continued into Friday, affecting businesses and government agencies across several regions as the technology company struggled to restore access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications.
The outage began Thursday in the United States and spread into Asia-Pacific business hours, affecting users in countries including India, Australia and Japan. It also disrupted organisations in the United States, with thousands of businesses and public institutions reporting problems accessing email and other digital services.
Microsoft said it had adjusted affected server infrastructure and observed some recovery in certain regions. However, the improvements were not sustained, leaving services unstable as engineers continued working to restore capacity.
In its latest updates early on Friday, the company said some affected servers were responding positively to recovery measures, but it was still monitoring their stability and preparing further interventions. Its efforts to restore normal operations were taking longer than expected.
Email disruption spreads across Microsoft 365
The main problem centres on Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email and messaging platform, which supports Outlook email, calendars, contacts and related services.
Because several Microsoft 365 applications rely on Exchange Online, the disruption extended beyond users being unable to open their inboxes.
Microsoft’s service updates identified problems affecting Outlook on the web and desktop, email delivery, access to recently used files, Copilot Chat, parts of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint-related functions and other business applications.
Some features remained available where they did not depend on Exchange Online. For example, Microsoft’s updates indicated that direct access to files stored in SharePoint and core Teams messaging and online meetings were largely functional, although users could still experience problems with features linked to email, calendars and other services.
The distinction is important for organisations because a Microsoft 365 subscription does not mean every application will necessarily fail when one component experiences problems. However, when several products depend on the same underlying infrastructure, a fault in one service can affect a much wider range of business operations.
Government agencies and businesses affected
The disruption has affected public institutions and private companies across several countries.
In Australia, Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said government agencies, including the country’s intelligence agency and federal police, had been affected.
Burke said Microsoft did not believe the incident was a cyberattack. He compared the situation to the 2024 CrowdStrike disruption, suggesting that an update or technical change may have gone wrong.
Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki also confirmed that the outage was affecting the government’s information system infrastructure, with authorities monitoring the situation.
In the United States, the House of Representatives said its users had been affected and that its engineers were working with Microsoft to address the problem.
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The disruption also reached major technology and commercial businesses. Artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with their Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services had been affected.
In Taiwan, securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies experienced disruption to fund management operations. Reuters reported that one company cancelled a scheduled bond repurchase agreement transaction because of the problems. The company was not identified.
US electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group also postponed the release of its third-quarter financial results from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruption caused by the global Microsoft outage.
What caused the outage?
Microsoft has not announced a definitive root cause, but its technical updates provide a clearer picture of what went wrong.
The company initially identified connectivity errors affecting part of its Exchange Online infrastructure. Its investigation later found that a number of servers were unexpectedly becoming unavailable, shifting traffic and processing demands onto the remaining infrastructure.
The additional load contributed to further connectivity problems, while some servers that were restarted and returned to service became unresponsive again when traffic was redirected to them.
Microsoft also identified problems with automated server health checks. These checks are designed to establish whether infrastructure is operating properly. When affected servers failed the checks, they were taken out of service, further reducing available capacity.
The company began testing alternative health-check methods, restarting affected servers, redistributing traffic across its global infrastructure and investigating recent configuration changes that might have contributed to the disruption. It also introduced temporary traffic restrictions in some locations to reduce pressure on affected systems.
These measures produced limited recovery, but the company continued to report instability as it worked to restore services.
Microsoft said it was not aware of malicious activity causing the outage. Australian authorities also said the company did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack.
This distinction matters because a technical failure and a cyberattack require different responses. At the time of the latest reports, there was no confirmed evidence that hackers had caused the disruption.
A reminder of the risks of relying on cloud services
The incident has renewed questions about the resilience of cloud-based business systems and the risks organisations face when critical operations depend heavily on a single technology provider.
Microsoft 365 is used by organisations for email, document management, online meetings, collaboration, data storage and administration. For many companies, these services are embedded in everyday operations, making it difficult to switch to alternatives at short notice.
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The disruption also demonstrates how a problem affecting one underlying service can spread across applications that businesses may regard as separate products.
The comparison with the CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 is significant. A faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused widespread disruption to Windows-based computers, affecting airlines, banks, hospitals and other organisations around the world.
Although the Microsoft outage is a different technical incident, both events have highlighted how failures in widely used technology infrastructure can have consequences far beyond the companies directly responsible.
Microsoft has also experienced other service disruptions in recent months. Its Azure cloud platform suffered an outage in October 2026 that affected productivity software and a range of industries. The latest incident is therefore adding to questions about the reliability of services on which businesses increasingly depend.
Reliability could become a business concern
For Microsoft, the immediate priority is restoring services and explaining what caused the disruption. But repeated outages could also affect customer confidence, particularly among large organisations that rely on its cloud ecosystem.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, told Reuters that investors were likely to look beyond the immediate disruption because few major customers could easily abandon Microsoft’s ecosystem.
However, he warned that repeated failures could prompt information technology departments to reconsider how much of their operations they place with a single provider.
That concern extends beyond Microsoft. Organisations increasingly depend on cloud platforms for critical business functions, but the convenience of centralised services can create a concentration risk when several operations rely on the same infrastructure.
For businesses, the lesson is not necessarily to abandon cloud services, but to ensure that essential operations can continue when a provider experiences an outage.
This includes maintaining alternative communication channels, secure backups, tested business continuity plans and procedures for accessing critical information when normal systems are unavailable.
What users and businesses should do
For individuals and organisations experiencing problems, Microsoft has advised that recovery may be gradual as servers return to service and applications reconnect.
Users should check Microsoft’s official service health updates or their organisation’s IT administrator for information about affected services. Businesses should avoid assuming that partial recovery means all functions have been restored.
Organisations relying on Outlook and Microsoft 365 for urgent communications should use approved alternative channels where necessary and ensure that important transactions and deadlines are not dependent on a single application being available.
As the recovery effort continues, the wider concern is how businesses can protect themselves against disruptions to the digital infrastructure on which their operations increasingly depend.
