Hong Kong, November 13: A widespread Microsoft service outage has disrupted businesses, government operations and users across several countries, with the technology giant struggling to fully restore its services after hours of disruption.
The outage has affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, particularly those connected to Exchange Online and email services.
Microsoft said on Friday that its engineers were working to identify the root cause and restore affected systems. The company described its approach as a measured effort to identify and repair the affected infrastructure.
The technology giant also clarified that there was no indication the disruption had been caused by malicious activity, assuring users that the incident was being treated with urgency and priority.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, more than 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook at the peak of the disruption on Thursday. Although complaints have since declined, service issues continued in several locations.
Microsoft initially indicated that it had successfully restored service functionality. However, a subsequent update revealed that the changes implemented to improve services were not delivering the expected results.
The disruption has affected organisations across Asia, the United States and other regions.
In the United States, industrial technology company Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly earnings conference call due to the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had drawn comparisons between the incident and the global CrowdStrike outage of July 2024. He added that the company did not believe the current disruption was caused by a cyberattack.
The 2024 CrowdStrike incident had triggered widespread disruption to airlines, banks, hospitals, broadcasters and businesses after a faulty software update affected millions of computers.
Several organisations in Asia have also reported difficulties. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency confirmed that government email services were affected, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court said the outage had disrupted some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the disruption had affected government IT infrastructure and that authorities were closely monitoring the situation.
Indian airlines also reported varying levels of impact. Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected, although it temporarily redirected its email services to ensure customer queries continued to be received.
IndiGo also reported disruptions to its email support services but clarified that its flight operations and other customer support channels continued normally.
Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic reported difficulties connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting how the outage has affected services that depend on Microsoft’s software ecosystem.
The disruption has once again raised concerns about the global dependence on major technology platforms and the widespread consequences of failures in critical digital infrastructure.
