Microsoft outages extend into 2nd day worldwide, company not aware of malicious activity

Microsoft said in an update Friday that an hourslong outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

Microsoft's early Friday updates give no sense as to when affected services might be restored

The Associated Press

· Posted: Nov 13, 2026 5:55 AM EST | Last Updated: 19 minutes ago

Listen to this article

Estimated 4 minutes

The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.

Microsoft said in an update Friday that an hourslong outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

The Redmond, Wa.-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using "a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure."

The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident "with urgency and priority until full resolution."

Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website, with the outage affecting individual users, companies and some government operation.

OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' software.

A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.

'Capacity improvements' seen compared to Thursday

Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.

Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," the company wrote.

WATCH | Canadians tell CBC News how they've been affected:

Microsoft says services slowly being restored after widespread outages | Hanomansing Live

10 hours ago|

Duration

3:52

Tens of thousands of Microsoft users across Canada and the United States were struggling to access Outlook's email services, Copilot's AI software and other essential programs Thursday in a widespread outage. As of Thursday evening, Microsoft said it was returning some of its affected servers to full service.

In a more recent update Friday, Microsoft said "we're seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue."

Hospitals, airlines, banks affected

A health-care network that runs several hospitals in Toronto declared a code grey, indicating an infrastructure failure.

Unity Health Toronto says its teams are experiencing difficulties sending and receiving emails, but that patient and resident care is not affected by the outage.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government's IT infrastructure and that they were "keeping a close eye on the developments." Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said.

The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses.

In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that he had spoken to Microsoft's top executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.

"They [Microsoft] don't believe they are dealing with a cyberattack," Burke told reporters in Sydney.

Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.

Singapore's Government Technology Agency said that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.

Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company's Outlook accounts could not receive updates from their U.S. customers due to the outage. If the situation dragged on further, this could "impact the production timeline," he said.

Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their operations disrupted.

U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.

Roughly 130,000 users from dozens of countries Downdetector reported problems on outage tracker with accessing Outlook on Thursday although new reports have since fallen from that peak.