By A global outage that knocked out Microsoft’s Outlook email service on Thursday has stretched into a second day, leaving millions of people without email and forcing businesses, banks and government offices around the world to fall back on telephones, faxes and even Bluetooth to get their work done.
By Akhtar Saleem Khan
Head of IT | The BNN Media – The Best News Network
News Beyond the Borders
REDMOND, United States — Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot services suffered a global outage lasting more than 12 hours on Thursday, 12 November, with disruption extending into Friday, 13 November and recovery continuing into the weekend. Microsoft blamed server problems for the failure and said it was not aware of any malicious activity, but as of Friday it had not declared the incident resolved and had given no deadline for full restoration.
How the outage began
The first reports appeared at about 12:50 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, when users began reporting problems accessing Outlook. The numbers climbed with extraordinary speed: outage tracker Downdetector recorded more than 2,400 reports for Outlook at 12:50 p.m., more than 25,000 by 1:03 p.m., and a peak of nearly 130,000 reports just after 1 p.m. ET, according to the Associated Press.
Within a single hour on Thursday, users in 74 countries had reported problems. By Friday, around 60 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, were still affected. The disruption hit Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR, among other Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft says on its website that more than 430 million people use its 365 services.
Downdetector figures count user-submitted complaints, not a verified number of affected customers — but the scale of the reports left no doubt that this was one of the largest outages Microsoft has suffered in years. It is Microsoft 365’s third major outage of 2026, following incidents in January and late August.
An outage that began at lunchtime on Thursday was still disrupting work on Friday — and that, more than any single number, is what made this one different.
What Microsoft says went wrong
Microsoft said a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” after failing automated checks, and later pointed to a core process on the affected servers that was becoming overwhelmed and causing them to stop responding. The company said it suspected a rise in infrastructure load had caused the failure, and ruled out a traffic surge as the cause.
Crucially, Microsoft has said it found no evidence of malicious activity. Executive vice president Charles Lamanna confirmed the outage did not appear to be the result of a cyberattack. The full root cause has not been published, and Microsoft has said it will provide further details after the incident is resolved.
Recovery has been slow and uneven. Microsoft admitted in one update that the changes it had applied to improve service were “not taking as expected”. In its latest update on Friday, the company said it was seeing signs of stabilisation after implementing fixes more broadly, and reported “encouraging recovery progress” in Europe and improvements in North America as of midday GMT — while warning that users may experience ongoing service issues as recovery efforts continue.
To protect users’ mail, Microsoft extended the window before a stuck email bounces to 48 hours, so delayed messages are held rather than lost.
Businesses fall back on faxes and phones
The outage was a reminder of how much of the world’s commerce, public services and communications run on a handful of technology providers. While most affected organisations reported their core systems were still running, trading and administrative work slowed sharply.
European stock market operator Euronext, which runs bourses in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Oslo, Athens and Milan, advised listed companies on Friday morning to use the telephone to communicate corporate information, after its own email was disrupted. “We have ensured that the team has sufficient capacity to manage the situation and handle the additional workload,” a spokesperson said, adding that Euronext was verifying the identity of callers to protect confidentiality.
British insurer Aviva, which reported earnings on Friday, put backup plans in place, including sending out alternative phone numbers for earnings calls and using Bluetooth to transfer recordings because email was down. Shipping group Maersk asked customers to call with anything urgent and urged them to verify any unexpected communications about the outage with their local representative.
In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. At one financial firm, trades such as purchases and sales of short-term bills, which are normally confirmed by email, had to be confirmed by fax instead. Foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were hit especially hard, a trader said, because much of their data is emailed to overseas headquarters through Microsoft’s systems.
Governments and public services hit too
Public bodies were affected on several continents. In Australia, Service NSW, the New South Wales Parliament, the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory governments, and Queensland Health reported trouble. In Japan, the National Disaster Management Agency was unable to send or receive email. In Canada, Alberta’s courts were affected, and Malaysian bank Maybank also reported problems.
In Britain, HSBC and Barclays activated internal incident teams to assess the impact. While email systems were down, most client services were unaffected — but HSBC reminded staff not to use unauthorised channels such as personal email or WhatsApp to get around the outage.
The disruption also reached the airline industry. Cathay Pacific said its flights were running normally but warned that some passengers might not receive its emails, while in India, SpiceJet cancelled three Friday-morning departures from Delhi — to Pune, Leh and Mumbai — with reports disagreeing about whether the Microsoft outage was the cause. That link has not been confirmed.
The backup question
For technology analysts, the outage raises a question that goes beyond one bad day: what happens when the tools the whole world depends on stop working at once?
“The pressure is mounting to invest in contingency plans and test whether those backups actually work when needed,” said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore, adding that firms needed multiple providers for key services like communication and data storage. Caitlin Egen of Control Risks called the outage a “wake-up call”, saying: “For a lot of businesses this morning, it’s probably been chaos trying to figure out how to even get in touch with people.”
Aviva’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, told Reuters the insurer had tested a similar-scale outage of its most critical technology systems about two weeks earlier — preparation that paid off on Friday. Not every organisation will have been as ready.
What users should do now
- Check the official Microsoft 365 service health information through your administrator account for updates relevant to your services and region.
- Do not assume a delayed email has been lost: Microsoft has extended the bounce window to 48 hours while backlogs clear.
- Use official channels only — banks and other organisations have warned against switching to personal email or WhatsApp to work around the outage.
- Expect intermittent problems to continue even as recovery progresses; Microsoft has said service health remains variable and capacity has not fully returned to normal.
Email is the plumbing of modern work — invisible until it breaks, and impossible to ignore once it does. Two days without it has shown the world exactly how much it depends on a single company’s servers.
By Akhtar Saleem Khan
Head of IT | The BNN Media – The Best News Network
News Beyond the Borders
