Microsoft said service availability was improving Friday as a global outage continued to disrupt Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. (Foto: Instagram)
Microsoft reported encouraging progress in restoring services in Europe on Friday, Nov. 13, as a global outage continued to affect businesses, government agencies and users. The disruption hit Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool. The company said service availability and email delivery were improving across a growing portion of the affected infrastructure.
Microsoft said Japan remained comparatively stable and North America was also showing improvement, though some users could still encounter intermittent problems while recovery work continued. In parts of the Asia-Pacific region, the company said it had completed actions to restore affected infrastructure. Traffic was returning gradually, with improvements in mailbox access and the processing of delayed email, according to a company statement.
The outage began at about 3 p.m. Brasilia time on Thursday, Nov. 12. It first affected users concentrated in the United States, then spread across the Asia-Pacific region and Europe overnight. The disruption interrupted administrative routines, business communications and work across multiple time zones. Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, along with major private companies, were among those affected. Operations at artificial intelligence developers OpenAI and Anthropic were also disrupted.
Microsoft said it had no indication that malicious activity caused the incident. On its Microsoft 365 status page, the company said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the outage. It said it would publish a post-incident report after the problem was mitigated, with details on the root cause and corrective and security measures. Microsoft suggested that configuration problems on servers running Microsoft 365 may have contributed to the failure. The company initially acknowledged that its first attempts to restore normal data traffic had not produced the expected results.
The company later reported improved server stability after applying a patch to an authentication and routing configuration component in part of its infrastructure. Microsoft said it would monitor the results and expand the measure to servers supporting regions coming back online. In Brazil, the Supreme Federal Court said its institutional email and Teams were among the affected tools, while its other systems continued to operate normally. The court said the disruption did not interfere with its judicial work, including proceedings conducted in its Virtual Plenary.
The effects extended beyond office communications. Japan’s economy minister said the instability had a “significant impact” on the country’s activities. Some Japanese government services switched to paper documents, and at least two financial institutions in Hong Kong suspended work Friday morning. In Australia, intelligence agencies and the national police reported operational problems. Local authorities and analysts said the financial and operational losses there could reach billions of dollars. Airlines, municipal administrations and at least one automaker also reported effects. European rail services experienced email delays that affected some users’ access to tickets, while staff in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service reported a serious impact on ambulance services.
