Microsoft logo at the Microsoft Experience Center, New York
A global Microsoft outage has left millions of people without Outlook email, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services for more than 12 hours, disrupting banks, governments, courts, and airlines across several continents.
The trouble began on Thursday in the Americas and went global within the hour: outage reports “reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour” , according to tracking site Downdetector, which logged a tenfold jump in UK reports at 17:43 UTC, then surges in India and New Zealand as their workdays arrived.
Microsoft has ruled out an attack. “There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Charles Lamanna, the company’s executive vice president for Copilot, Agents, and Platform, wrote on X.
@MSFT365Status We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.
— Charles Lamanna (@clamanna) November 13, 2026
But the fix is proving stubborn: after initially seeing positive results, Microsoft said overnight that traffic rerouting and strategic blocking were producing only partial, not “sustained”, recovery.
The likely shape of the cause came from an unusual source. Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft believes it is dealing with something similar to CrowdStrike in 2024, “an update that has gone awry”, per CNN.
Australia’s spy agency and federal police are among the organisations hit.
Bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong told CNN they were locked out of email and Teams all day. Japan’s government went back to paper, with ministries unable to send email through most of Friday’s workday, a deputy chief cabinet secretary said.
The Philippine Supreme Court warned of delays; Australian schools and courts opened to dead inboxes; US city governments from Miami Beach to Austin told residents to phone instead, and a Colorado sheriff’s office said the outage delayed bond payments for prisoners. Airlines including IndiGo and Akasa lost email support channels, and EV maker Workhorse postponed its earnings call.
Banks from Standard Chartered to ING Australia are already warning of the second wave: scammers posing as tech support to exploit the chaos, at a moment when the email-security systems that would normally catch them are down too.
The timing could hardly be more pointed for Europe, where the outage stretched into the very day EU leaders meet in Dublin to discuss reducing dependence on foreign technology.
The continent has been here before: the 2024 CrowdStrike meltdown exposed its dangerous dependence on a handful of US providers, and the calls to break up that concentration have only grown since.
As of Friday morning, the world’s default office is still waiting for its email.
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