Microsoft's massive outage hits government agencies and businesses across three continents
Australia, Japan and the United States were among the countries affected, while OpenAI, Anthropic and several airlines reported disruptions. Microsoft said its efforts to restore services had produced only partial recovery.
A disruption to Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot extended into business hours across the Asia-Pacific region on Friday after affecting tens of thousands of users in the United States, as the tech giant struggled to resolve server problems behind the outage.
The disruption affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. It is the second major disruption to Microsoft's 365 services this year, raising concerns that repeated failures could lead corporate customers to question the reliability of the company's products.
In its latest update, Microsoft said it had applied adjustments to the affected servers, but they had not resulted in a sustained recovery. The company reported some partial improvement in regions where the adjustments had been implemented.
"We're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability," Microsoft said on X.
Downdetector, which tracks outages by aggregating user reports from various sources, showed more than 18,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at 11:30 p.m. ET on Thursday. It also showed disruptions to several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, in the early hours of Friday local time.
At its peak, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. The disruption had been ongoing for approximately 12 hours by the time of the latest reports.
In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of its Microsoft 365 services that depend on Exchange Online and email had been affected, while functions that do not rely on Exchange Online remained operational. Exchange Online is Microsoft's cloud-based messaging platform, which provides email, calendars, contacts and task management.
The company added that it was "not aware" of any malicious activity behind the outage.
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed the disruption was not caused by 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 email systems," he added.
Australia's intelligence agency and federal police were among the organizations affected by the outage on Friday.
The CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024 was one of the largest technology disruptions in recent history, crippling systems at hospitals, banks and airports and highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technology infrastructure.
The U.S. House of Representatives said the outage had affected its users and that its engineers were working with Microsoft to address the problem.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the disruption was affecting the government's information systems infrastructure.
U.S. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had experienced problems with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported disruptions to their email support services.
The outage also affected fund management operations at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. One company went so far as to cancel a previously scheduled bond repurchase transaction, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, declining to identify the company.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would probably look past the outage for now, but warned that repeated disruptions could damage Microsoft's reputation over time.
"I think investors will take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight," Gilbert said.
"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. The market will want to see Microsoft prove it can keep the lights on before it asks customers to spend more on Copilot."
Microsoft experienced another outage affecting its 365 services in January this year, following a similar disruption in October 2025.
Last month, Microsoft also reported an outage affecting its Azure cloud platform, which disrupted its productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which had been scheduled to report its third-quarter results on November 12, postponed the announcement until November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.
