Symbolic imageMicrosoft restores 365 services after global outage blamed on network upgrade
A server failure cut Outlook, Teams and Copilot for users worldwide from Thursday evening. Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack and reported improving recovery on Friday.
Microsoft said the outage was a self-inflicted fault, not a cyberattack: a flaw from an earlier network capacity upgrade only surfaced after recent network changes. After a patch and extra capacity, its status page reported on Friday, 13 November, "sustained improvement" in Europe, though some users still had intermittent problems. SharePoint, OneDrive, the admin portal and connectors to OpenAI and Anthropic were also affected.
Agencies and companies disrupted
The outage reached government agencies from Australia to Japan and the US, and NHS services switched to alternatives including paper records. Richemont and Workhorse postponed earnings, and a Taiwanese firm cancelled a bond repurchase, a source told Reuters. Australia's government activated an agreement for priority restoration.
German federal offices unaffected
The BSI said the federal administration was not affected, as many agencies run a Bundesclient on government networks. Thomas Jarzombek, parliamentary state secretary in the digital ministry, said the outage shows the risk of relying on one provider.
A repeat problem
Microsoft's own figures put Q1 2026 uptime at 99.526 percent, the lowest since 2013, after a nearly ten-hour outage in January. Another followed in late August.