A major outage in Microsoft's infrastructure has highlighted how heavily government agencies, financial markets and large companies depend on a single technology giant's cloud services. Disruptions to Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and other Microsoft products affected users in 74 countries, interrupted business communications and forced employees at some organizations to return to phone calls and alternative messaging apps.

According to Downdetector, around 200,000 reports of problems with the company's various services were submitted during the outage. Bloomberg described the incident as one of the most serious outages in Microsoft's history. The problems began on Thursday evening in the United States, then spread to Asia and began affecting Europe. At the time of publication, they had been ongoing for more than 12 hours.

From financial markets to government agencies

The disruptions affected not only individual users but also organizations that rely on email and corporate platforms for their day-to-day operations.

In Australia and across Asia, traders faced limited access to work tools and information. To continue communicating with clients and coordinating trades, they had to use phones and messaging apps. According to Wilson Asset Management portfolio manager Matthew Haupt, problems accessing information led to a decline in trading volumes for small-cap stocks.

“It's an absolute disaster, and I can't believe the issue still hasn't been resolved,” Rita Elkazzi, a director of execution services at UBS Group in Australia and New Zealand, told Bloomberg after reporting that Outlook had stopped working.

The outage also affected government bodies. In Australia, the intelligence service and federal police experienced problems. The country's Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke, said the main difficulties involved email systems. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed that the disruptions had affected government IT infrastructure. The U.S. House of Representatives also reported problems.

Commercial organizations were affected as well. Customer support teams at Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air lost access to email. Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the release of its quarterly results until November 16, citing problems with Microsoft's systems. OpenAI and Anthropic were also among those affected.

Microsoft has yet to restore stable service

The company has linked the incident to server problems but has not yet disclosed the exact cause of the outage. Microsoft said it had made changes to the affected servers, but those measures had not resulted in a sustained recovery of its services.

“We are assessing what additional measures can be taken to improve the overall stability of the infrastructure,” the company said in its latest update.

Australian authorities, meanwhile, do not believe the incident is linked to a cyberattack. According to Minister Tony Burke, Microsoft also does not consider malicious activity to be the cause.

The problems affected several products within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. In addition to Outlook and Teams, users reported issues with OneDrive: in particular, the service would not allow them to upload changes, displaying a message that the server was busy. Copilot also experienced disruptions.

The latest incident follows other major Microsoft outages: similar problems were recorded in January 2026 and in October of last year. However, this outage stands out for its geographical reach and duration, with disruptions spreading to dozens of countries and affecting government systems as well as financial and commercial organizations.