Traffic is gradually being restored across affected regions as engineers extend infrastructure fixes following widespread disruptions to Outlook and Teams
REDMOND, United States — Microsoft reported progress on Friday, November 13, in restoring traffic across its cloud infrastructure following a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services for millions of users.
After completing recovery actions across portions of its infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region, Microsoft stated that engineering teams are extending the stabilization measures to other affected regions. The company noted early signs of stabilization and improvements in key customer scenarios, though service capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, affected organizations across 74 countries and territories. Major institutions impacted included UK National Health Service (NHS) organizations and police forces, Japan’s Ministry of Finance, government departments in Australia, and visa processing operations in New Zealand. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air also reported disruptions to email support services, while financial traders in parts of Asia resorted to phone calls and fax machines to confirm transactions.
Microsoft attributed the outage to server stability issues and elevated workloads affecting its Exchange Online infrastructure, adding that it has found no evidence of malicious activity or a cyberattack. After initial fixes failed to take effect as expected, engineers implemented virtual machine scaling, traffic throttling, and failover routing to stabilize affected servers.
