OMM Newsroom
Microsoft worked to restore its systems on Friday after a major outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot services in the United States and Asia-Pacific region. The incident affected government agencies in the United States, Australia and Japan, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, AnewZ reported.
The outage lasted about 12 hours. More than 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook were recorded in the United States when reports to Downdetector reached their peak.
Microsoft said it had made changes to the affected servers, but services had not been fully restored. “We are reviewing additional actions we can take to improve the resilience of our overall infrastructure,” the company wrote on X.
According to a statement posted by the Microsoft 365 Status account on Nov. 12, the company was investigating reports that users in the Americas were having difficulty connecting to their Exchange Online mailboxes through various methods. Further information was posted in the Microsoft 365 admin center under code EX1550543.
The outage affected email services in several countries. Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were among those experiencing problems.
Australian Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft did not believe the incident was caused by a cyberattack. Comparing the situation with the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, he suggested that a faulty software update could be responsible.
“The impact they are experiencing ... is primarily related to email systems,” Burke said.
Problems also affected government systems in Japan. The U.S. House of Representatives confirmed that its users were experiencing difficulties.
Companies also reported disruptions. OpenAI and Anthropic encountered problems using Microsoft connectors. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services had been disrupted.
The incident has renewed concerns about the reliability of Microsoft services. Microsoft 365 experienced an outage in January, while a more widespread disruption affected the Azure platform last month.
Market analyst Josh Gilbert said repeated outages could affect customer confidence: “If reliability starts to look like a recurring issue, it gives every IT department a reason to think again before handing a larger share of its business to one provider.”
Microsoft said it was continuing to investigate the cause of the problem and work to restore services to normal.
