What is known about the outage of Microsoft services

FAQ Massive IT disruptions What is known about the failure of Microsoft services As of: November 13, 2026 • 11:15 a.m

Services from the US software company Microsoft have been down or disrupted worldwide for many hours, including the email program Outlook. Who is affected and what background is suspected - an overview.

Microsoft services worldwide have been affected by a massive disruption - since Thursday. Companies and authorities have major problems with important software, as do private users. According to Microsoft, efforts to resolve the issue have not gone “as hoped.”

A widespread outage of Microsoft services, including Outlook, is causing disruptions worldwide. more

Not only the Outlook email program is affected, but also services from the Microsoft 365 cloud package in general. With the Office communications service Teams, for example, planning meetings and calendar connections often did not work properly.

In addition, the AI ​​assistant Copilot, the management portal for administrators and interfaces to third-party providers - including AI services such as OpenAI and Anthropic - were disrupted at least temporarily.

According to Microsoft, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. Australian Interior and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said the company was not expecting a cyberattack. Rather, it is apparently a faulty update, similar to the global IT breakdown caused by the security company CrowdStrike in 2024.

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That is unclear. The massive disruption at the US technology company had already caused tens of thousands of users problems accessing their emails in Outlook on Thursday. As the disruption platform Downdetector reported, the disruption spread worldwide within an hour and paralyzed Microsoft services in more than 70 countries. It is known that around 430 million people worldwide use Microsoft 365 services.

Sensitive areas of government are also affected by the disruption. The secret service and the federal police in Australia reported failures. The Canberra government activated an agreement with Microsoft to ensure priority system restoration. ​

The US House of Representatives also reported restrictions for its users. The outage also affected the infrastructure of the state information system in Japan, as Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki announced. According to the BBC, the British health service NHS and the Parliament in London are also affected.

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The effects also had a wide impact on the economy. AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic investigated problems with interfaces to Microsoft services. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air's email support was also affected.

The outage also disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment companies in Taiwan. According to the Reuters news agency, one company even canceled a planned securities repurchase transaction.

The US electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the presentation of its quarterly figures to November 16th due to IT problems. The publication of the balance sheet at the luxury group and Cartier owner Richemont was also delayed. Microsoft had stated that a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable. However, this is not due to a sudden increase in data traffic.

According to the Federal Office for Information Security, the situation appears to have been overcome

Microsoft is documenting the tough fight against the outages, which was initially without resounding success, via messages on the online platform X and on its service status page. According to its own statements, the company is making progress bit by bit in fixing it. "Thanks to our recent traffic optimization measures, we are seeing positive results in terms of service stability and increased capacity," said the software company.

In the meantime, Microsoft seemed to be able to report success: some of the servers were being brought back online - "and they remain stable so far." However, a setback followed shortly afterwards: servers that had been restarted threatened to fail again as soon as data traffic hit them again. A later attempt to start up parts of the infrastructure in isolation initially only produced partially positive results; According to the company, further countermeasures did not work as hoped.

It initially remained unclear when all Microsoft 365 services should run without restrictions again.

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It is the second outage of Microsoft 365 services this year, following similar issues in January. Last month, a failure of the Azure cloud platform caused disruptions worldwide.

Market analyst Josh Gilbert from trading platform eToro explained that repeated outages could damage customer trust in Microsoft in the long term. If reliability becomes a recurring problem, it will be a reason for any IT department to think twice before putting more business in the hands of a single vendor.

Outages of online services are part of everyday life - but they are usually only short-lived. Sometimes, however, the problems in the huge cloud infrastructures are so serious that disruptions occur for hours.

After the global disruption, Microsoft systems are recovering - but not all users are online again. more

The current outage is reminiscent of the Crowdstrike breakdown two years ago: At that time, a faulty software update to the CrowdStrike Falcon security software for Microsoft Windows triggered a global IT breakdown. Airlines, hospitals, banks, supermarkets and emergency services around the world were forced to suspend operations in some cases completely.

According to a study by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), 48 percent of the affected German companies had to temporarily stop operations.

This topic in the program: tagesschau.de | Massive impairment of Microsoft services on the Internet | 11/13/26 | 6:55 a.m