Microsoft Working to Fix Widespread Outage — 2nd Update

By Kimberley Kao and Fabiana Negrin Ochoa

Microsoft said it is working to resolve an hourslong outage that has disrupted services that include Outlook and Teams, with government departments and schools from the U.S. to Australia among those affected.

A company spokesperson said Microsoft was working to address issues affecting Microsoft 365 services, such as artificial-intelligence software Copilot, and restore services as quickly as possible.

Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said in a post on X that there is no indication that the disruption is the result of malicious or cyber activity. "We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it," he said.

Initial efforts hadn't been as successful as hoped, as changes made to improve serviceability weren't taking as expected, Microsoft said on X as part of earlier updates on the issue.

Microsoft said it was seeking ways to boost capacity to allow more information to flow while attempting a fix to the system.

"We're seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions," the company said in its latest update on Friday. "We're implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery."

Microsoft first said it was investigating reports of problems encountered by users attempting to access their email at 12:54 p.m. ET on Thursday.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, tens of thousands of users have reported problems accessing Microsoft's email and online-meetings platform. Microsoft's outage reports on Thursday reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector, the tracker said on X.

Users visiting some government websites, including in the U.S., were met with appeals for them to contact offices by phone. In Australia's remote Northern Territory, where many classes are held online, education officials said schools were experiencing technical difficulties and urged people to be patient.

OpenAI said its ChatGPT service was affected and it was working to mitigate the impact. Anthropic flagged a similar issue that is affecting its Microsoft 365 connector and Claude for Outlook.

"We're investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected," OpenAI said on its website.

The Microsoft outage mirrors problems that hit Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services a year ago, roiling the systems that individuals and businesses use to communicate with each other. The Cloudflare outage in November 2025 knocked swaths of the internet offline, including social-media sites.

Experts said the latest outage is a reminder of the dangers that businesses face when relying on one service for vital communications. It also highlights the importance of contingency planning.

"Customers need a rehearsed plan for keeping essential work and communications going when their usual services are unavailable," said Mohammad Goudarzi from the Faculty of Information Technology at Australia's Monash University.

As of 03:20 a.m. ET, many of Microsoft's services remained down. The company's health status website showed "service degradation."

Write to Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com and Fabiana Negrin Ochoa at fabiana.negrinochoa@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 13, 2026 04:10 ET (09:10 GMT)