Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot services remained disrupted on Friday, as a widespread outage of its Microsoft 365 platform stretched beyond 12 hours, hitting business communications, government operations and financial activity in several countries.
Reuters reported that some organisations were forced back to fax machines, and that at least one bond repurchase was halted. Microsoft attributed the disruption to server-related problems and said it had found no sign of malicious activity. It said its engineers had applied fixes across a wider part of its infrastructure, and that it was seeing signs of stabilisation, although a full and lasting recovery had not yet been confirmed.
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Microsoft said the outage hit features tied to Exchange Online, its cloud email and scheduling service, while applications not connected to it kept working. Exchange Online delivers email, calendars, contacts and tasks. Organisations in Australia, Japan, the United States, and parts of Europe and Asia were affected, and some businesses turned to other ways of communicating.
Microsoft apologised on Friday, saying it knew the trust customers place in its services and took that responsibility extremely seriously.
The disruption went beyond everyday email. In Taiwan, fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies was affected, according to sources cited by Reuters. One financial institution reportedly used fax machines to confirm trades. In Europe, exchange operator Euronext said its listing teams had email problems, British insurer Aviva activated contingency plans before its earnings calls, and Danish shipping group Maersk warned customers of delays to email replies and service updates.
Airlines were also affected, with India’s IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India reporting problems with their email support. US electric truck maker Workhorse Group delayed its results announcement, originally due on Thursday, to November 16, while Swiss luxury group Richemont briefly delayed publishing its first-half results on Friday. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with their Microsoft connectors.
Public bodies were not spared. Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were among those affected, and the US House of Representatives said some of its users lost access, with technical teams working with Microsoft on the fault.
The incident adds to a run of Microsoft disruptions. The company had another Microsoft 365 outage in January 2026, and further disruptions in October 2025, including an Azure cloud incident later that month. Together they raise questions about the reliability of cloud platforms that are now central to how businesses and public institutions work.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, said repeated reliability concerns could lead corporate IT departments to reconsider how much of their operations they concentrate in Microsoft’s ecosystem, which could open opportunities for rival cloud and productivity providers.
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