Microsoft struggles to restore services as outage hits companies and
governments worldwide
[November 13, 2026]
By CHAN HO-HIM
HONG KONG (AP) — From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving
services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted
many users, companies and some government operations as the technology
giant struggled to fix the issue.
Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide
range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online
and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant
Copilot were reported by users to be down.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different
ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back
online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected
infrastructure.”
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was
caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency
and priority until full resolution.”
Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its
website.
Roughly 130,000 users from dozens of countries Downdetector reported
problems on outage tracker with accessing Outlook on Thursday although
new reports have since fallen from that peak.
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were
struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and
functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted
services and was continuing to address the issue.
Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick
resolution.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve
serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the
company wrote.
In a more recent update Friday, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early
stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.”
Governments, businesses from Japan to Australia affected
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a
conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday Microsoft had
likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and
the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global
disruption.
"They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack.
They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar
to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that
has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.
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A Microsoft logo and sign outside the Microsoft Visitor Center are
seen at the company's headquarters Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, in Redmond,
Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)
In July 2024, a massive global tech outage grounded flights,
disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers, with Texas-based
cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike blaming a faulty update to computers
running Microsoft Windows that allowed its systems to push bad data
out to millions of customer machines.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said
his company's Outlook accounts could not receive updates from their
U.S. customers due to the outage. If the situation dragged on
further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said. Some
banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their
operations disrupted.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global
Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email
services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline
without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, said it also reported
disruptions to its email support services, which affected its
ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X
said its other support channels remained operational and its flight
operations were unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said that government emails
were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve
the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the
ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its
operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the
outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that they
were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” Japanese authorities
had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools
such as telephones, the government said.
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems
connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects
of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to
interact with other companies’ software.
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AP journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, Sheikh Saaliq in New
Delhi and Mayuko Ono in Tokyo contributed.
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