London: Microsoft has reported significant progress in restoring its services following a global outage that disrupted businesses, government agencies and individuals across 74 countries and territories. The company said its consumer products had fully recovered, while its Microsoft 365 enterprise services were also showing sustained improvement. The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, affected several widely used Microsoft products, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot and other services connected to its cloud infrastructure. Users experienced difficulties accessing emails, joining online meetings, sharing documents and using workplace applications.
Microsoft confirmed that its consumer products and services had fully recovered at 16:10 UTC on Friday, November 13. However, the company said it was continuing to monitor its enterprise services, particularly the backlog of email messages accumulated during the disruption, before declaring the incident resolved. Microsoft apologised to customers and partners for the disruption, describing it as a technical issue unrelated to cyber activity or artificial intelligence agents. The company said the problem originated from an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a more recent network change.
The technical failure affected Microsoft's infrastructure and left some servers unresponsive. During the recovery process, engineers experienced difficulties restoring some servers because they became unresponsive again when traffic returned. Microsoft gradually restored services while monitoring the stability of its systems. The company said it had addressed the underlying technical issue and was continuing to restore services to remaining customers and regions. It also promised to provide further information about the incident and the measures being taken to prevent similar disruptions.
Although access to several services improved, the accumulated email backlog remained an important concern during the recovery process. Messages had been delayed while the systems were experiencing difficulties, affecting communication between businesses and their customers. Microsoft extended its email timeout period to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while engineers worked to restore normal delivery. The company reported that email queues had fallen significantly and were approaching normal levels during the recovery process.
The outage had consequences beyond individual users, disrupting several public services and business operations around the world. In the United Kingdom, the disruption affected healthcare communications, police reporting systems and court operations. Staff handling emergency calls in the National Health Service experienced difficulties referring patient details through normal channels, creating a backlog. The National Pharmacy Association also warned that prescription services could face delays. In Australia, government organisations, including the country's intelligence agency and federal police, experienced disruption.
Authorities said arrangements were being made to prioritise important government services. Japan also reported problems affecting government information technology infrastructure. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said authorities were monitoring the situation and had secured alternative communication methods. In India, airlines including IndiGo and Akasa Air reported problems with their email support services, warning that some customer messages might not reach them. Other businesses also experienced difficulties accessing workplace applications and maintaining normal communications.
The international scale of the disruption was reflected in reports received by Downdetector, an online platform that monitors service interruptions. The platform recorded reports from 74 countries and territories, although this figure does not represent the actual number of people affected. The incident has renewed concerns about the growing dependence of governments and businesses on a small number of major technology companies. Microsoft 365 is widely used for email, online meetings, document sharing and other workplace activities, making interruptions particularly challenging for organisations that rely on its services.
The disruption has also drawn comparisons with the July 2024 CrowdStrike incident, which affected computers running Microsoft Windows and disrupted airlines, hospitals, banks and other organisations. However, the two incidents had different technical causes. The 2024 incident followed a faulty software update, while Microsoft attributed the November outage to a problem associated with an earlier network capacity upgrade. Microsoft's recovery efforts have helped restore access to its widely used services, but the incident has highlighted the importance of reliable digital infrastructure and alternative communication arrangements. The company is expected to provide a detailed post incident report explaining the technical failure and the steps being taken to strengthen its systems.