Microsoft outage live: ‘positive results for server stability’ reported, amid global disruption

UK schools who use Microsoft services may have trouble communicating with parents today.

One London school said emails would be delayed until the issue with Outlook is resolved and that parents and carers should phone in if their child would be absent today.

A second school in the capital warned parents that it currently had limited, or no, access to services such as Outlook (emails) and Teams (virtual meetings). Parents should phone to report attendance and absences, it added.

In Salisbury, Wilton CofE Primary School urged anyone needing to contact the school to do so by phone, posting on Facebook:

“If you are just waking up to the news today, Microsoft emails and teams are down globally.

“This will affect our communication today, however, in a tech world, our teaching is practical, innovative and fun and your children will have no idea.”

The UK government spends at least £1.9bn on Microsoft software each year, so the outage could potentially cause disruption to a range of services.

British government engineers are working with Microsoft to assess the impact of the outage, according to a UK minister.

However, he could not confirm whether any government systems had been affected.

Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, told Times Radio:

“Government engineers and the systems are working with Microsoft at the moment. I would expect that to be able to be detailed throughout the day. But as more people come online with their working days shortly, I think there’ll be sadly more people frustrated with the system.”

“The understanding that I have from Downing Street on this is that government systems are being looked at in relation to Microsoft. “

Across Europe, millions of Microsoft customers will have woken up to the news that the company is strugging to get its services back online.

The disruption, which began around 6pm GMT on Thursday, has disrupted key Microsoft services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot. Initially mainly affecting US users, it has gone on to cause disruption across the Asia-Pacific region.

Microsoft has suggested the outage may have been caused by issues with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running. It says it doesn’t believe it is suffering a cyber attack.

And it became clear that the problem was pretty serious when the company admitted that the fix was “not taking as expected”.

The outage hit government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including two massive AI companies – OpenAI and Anthropic.

In Japan, the economy, trade and industry minister said the disruption had had a “major impact,” on the world’s fourth-biggest economy.

Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organizations reporting disruption there, with billions of dollars of damage predicted.

The latest word from Microsoft is that it is seeing “positive results for server stability” after applying a software patch.

But despite that, the company still reports “Service degradation on Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) and Microsoft consumer products”.

The Microsoft outage has caused disruption among companies and government ministries in Japan, forcing staff to turn to analogue methods to distribute information and contact clients, our colleague Justin McCurry reports from Tokyo.

The digital minister, Toshiharu Furukawa, said the government’s email services had become unavailable and that it would temporarily use other formats, including text messaging, as an “emergency measure”.

The economy, trade and industry minister, Ryosei Akazawa, conceded that the disruption had had a “major impact,” on the world’s fourth-biggest economy. “Since this software is used by a vast number of people, we will closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it,” he said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The realisation that something was wrong hit as soon as employees tried to log on this morning, with social media flooded with complaints from users who were unable to check work emails.

The government confirmed the outage had disrupted a shared network the digital agency uses to send information to ministries and other official bodies.

The chaos also seeped into the private sector. The shipping firm Sagawa Express, which uses Outlook, said it was unable to accept online reservations for its hands-free luggage service at airports and train stations, according to the Kyodo news agency.

Taisho, a major pharmaceutical company, said it was having to handle orders by phone.

Outlook is also used by Japan’s defence ministry and the cabinet office, which said it would pin notices on bulletin boards to notify media organisations of upcoming press conferences.

The meteorological agency said it does not use Microsoft to issue special weather and earthquake warnings to local governments.

Just in: Microsoft reports it is seeing some ‘positive results’ in its efforts to get its services back online for millions of customers around the world.

In a new updates to the status page for its Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) products, it says:

Current status: We’re seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure. We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.

Microsoft also reiterates that it doesn’t think the disruption is due to a hacking attack, saying:

As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution. Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a Post-Incident Report.

Consumers, as well as businesses, are suffering disruption.

Microsoft reports that ‘the issue’ affecting is affecting Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web – although there may be problems with other Microsoft 365 services too.

The Microsoft outage is causing a headache for financial traders – at at time when the crisis at Nvidia is already causing jitters in the markets.

Bloomberg reports that some portfolio managers have been unable to check emails, making it hard to access trading platforms that require email authentication.

It’s also proving harder to get confirmation that trades have been carried out, forcing traders to use some “old-school” methods.

Eugene Koh, sales trader at CMC Markets Singapore, says:

“Everyone was back on the phone, and our WhatsApp chats were busier than usual.

“Something that normally takes a second on email might now take a phone call and a few minutes to get through.”

More here.

This is Graeme Wearden in the UK, taking over from Achol Arok.

Microsoft has just pushed out a small update to its service status page, saying it is seeing ’marginal success’ from its efforts to fix the problem.

It says:

Current status: We’re continuing to monitor activity across regions to evaluate server status and determine actions that can be taken to improve capacity. This includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied and working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed.

At this point, we have observed marginal success. In parallel, we’re taking action to expand capacity through the utilization of Virtual Machines.

But the upshot, as Europe wakes up, is that users may still be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services…

US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were impacted.

The outage also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers, and investment trust companies. One of the companies went as far as cancelling a bond repurchase agreement transaction it had already scheduled, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, declining to provide the name of the company.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could ⁠hurt Microsoft over time.

I think investors will take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk ​away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight.

The bigger worry is that ​this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability ​starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one ​provider’s hands.

The market will want to see ‌Microsoft prove it can keep the lights ​on before it asks customers to spend ​more on Copilot.

The Microsoft outage is being described as a disaster for the Australian business sector, with costs running into the billions of dollars.

The financial impact had already been massive in the 12 hours the systems had been down, a privacy and security expert said. The cost to Australia would be billions of dollars, said Ashwin Pal, of the risk advisory firm RSM Australia:

That’s not just direct, but indirect costs as well.

But a protracted event like this can easily be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for smaller entities.

Pal said his clients had activated business continuity and disaster recovery plans, but many businesses didn’t have a fallback.

They’re just at a standstill – if you don’t actually have a plan B, then you’ve got a problem.

Pal said that Microsoft was obviously struggling to recover, which raised bigger questions.

I’m a technologist and I’m actually flabbergasted as to how something like this could have happened ... they pushed out a change which should have been tested.

Computer society calls for review of Australia’s reliance on single providers

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has renewed calls for the federal government to review which critical IT systems rely on a single provider and where backup options could keep the economy running.

The organisation also accused the government of failing to effectively communicate updates to the public.

Chief executive Dr Prins Ralston said:

Who in Australia was accountable for keeping them informed? And who will answer for the lost productivity and the cost to the Australian economy?

Ralston said the outage “exposed Australia’s reliance on foreign technology”, particularly on small businesses.

Customers may be able to claim service credits under their cloud contracts. Those credits won’t make up for a lost morning of trade for a small business.

Australians who couldn’t get paid, couldn’t send an invoice, or couldn’t reach a government service this morning are entitled to be worried. ASIO and the AFP had workarounds. Most small businesses and many agencies don’t. Resilience shouldn’t depend on whether you happen to have a second system.

Australian economic impact unknown

The assistant treasurer, Daniel Mulino, said he could not quantify the impact the outage was having on the Australian economy.

Speaking on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, he said:

What I could say is, I think, like everybody, I appreciate a bit of downtime from my email occasionally but, obviously, would rather it not happen from a global downturn.

Look, this is a global issue, and it reinforces to us how important the digital side of our economy is and how interconnected everything is.

Obviously, the quicker this gets up, the lower the disruption will be.

Microsoft outage disrupts Taiwanese businesses

Microsoft’s global outage has disrupted businesses in Taiwan, with more than a hundred reports of service disruptions recorded from the island between 3am and 9am on Friday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.

Office workers said they were unable to send or receive emails through Outlook, while others reported problems with Teams’ calendar and scheduling functions.

The Friday disruption has prompted jokes on social media, with some office workers suggesting they might as well call it a day and go home early to enjoy the weekend.

“Dear Microsoft, please don’t rush to fix Outlook. And while you’re at it, could you take Teams down for maintenance too? Sincerely, an exhausted Taiwanese worker,” wrote one user on social media platform Threads.

The post garnered more than 18,000 likes within a few hours, after some of the features including messaging have gradually returned to normal on Teams.

Microsoft working ‘with urgency’ to end outage

The latest update from Microsoft has arrived, and there’s still no sign the outage will end soon.

The company said its latest fix is still experiencing issues with traffic surges, and Microsoft is still trying to pinpoint the underlying cause.

Microsoft said:

Current actions we are taking include scaling up virtual machines to increase capacity and reduce load. Additionally, we’re querying for machines in a bad state to perform a force sync for our recent network change, which may improve service availability.

However, we are encountering issues with the machines being stuck in a bad state, preventing our changes from syncing as expected. We’ll continue to monitor the effectiveness of changes applied so we can determine what refinements are necessary.

Microsoft rules out cyber-attack as cause of outage

Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna has confirmed the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity breach.

In a post on social media, Lamanna said:

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.

Government departments warn clients and stakeholders of disruptions

Several federal agencies have issued notices saying they are not receiving communications due to the outage.

Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade published this statement on its website:

Due to the global Microsoft outage, all urgent sanctions enquiries should be directed to the Australian Sanctions Office by telephone.

The department of agriculture, fisheries and forestry issued this notice:

As of Friday 13 November 2026, there is a broad service disruption affecting DAFF messaging due to the current Microsoft D365 outage. As a result, clients may not be able to send emails to or receive emails from departmental systems.