Microsoft said it had restored service to customers after a massive global outage that caused chaos for public services and businesses around the world. In an X post, the company said it had completed its efforts to address the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions. The disruption had lasted more than 12 hours, beginning on Nov. 12, and affected a wide range of products including Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant.
The outage swept the globe, taking the company's products offline in at least 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to the monitoring site Downdetector. Government agencies in the United States, Australia and Japan were affected, and many companies were delayed in publishing results to stock exchanges. In Ireland, national institutions including the Mater hospital and the Irish embassy in London were hit. Microsoft said more than 430 million people worldwide use its Microsoft 365 apps.S1S2
Microsoft attributed the disruption to an earlier "network capacity upgrade" that surfaced after a network change, and to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, and said the incident was not related to a cyberattack or AI tooling. Australia's home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft had likened the outage to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, which was triggered by a faulty antivirus software update. Microsoft apologized, and Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, said the recovery had been harder than usual because of "technical challenges and failure modes".S1S2
Recovery was gradual. On Nov. 13, Microsoft said services had improved broadly across North America and Europe, with progress in the Asia–Pacific region, but warned some users could still face intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery. Engineers encountered setbacks when servers returned to service became unresponsive again once they received traffic. Lamanna said a full post-mortem would be published shortly, covering the step-by-step timeline and repair items to avoid similar outages in the future.S1
