A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot-related services into Asia-Pacific business hours on November 13, as the company struggled to achieve sustained recovery after adjusting affected servers.
Businesses and government agencies across several countries reported disruption. In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email-support services were affected, according to Reuters. The report did not establish that their flight operations were disrupted.
Microsoft said it had observed partial recovery in regions where it applied server adjustments, but the improvement was not sustained. Full restoration had not been confirmed in the reports reviewed for this draft.
Microsoft outage extends into November 13
Problems emerged in the United States on November 12 and continued as organizations in Asia-Pacific began work on Friday. Reuters reported disruption in India, Australia and Japan.
Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States around 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday. More than 18,000 reports remained at 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time, equivalent to 10 a.m. IST on November 13, Reuters reported.
These are outage-tracker reports, not a verified count of unique affected customers. Falling report numbers do not establish that service has been restored for every organization.
Exchange Online dependencies widen the impact
In a service-health notice cited by Reuters, Microsoft said affected Microsoft 365 features depended on Exchange Online and email. Features that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional.
Exchange Online provides cloud-based email, calendars, contacts and tasks. Its role across Microsoft’s applications helps explain why problems were reported beyond Outlook, including in Teams and Copilot-related services. The reports do not mean every feature of those products failed for every user.
Governments and airline email support affected
The US House of Representatives said the outage affected its users and that its engineers were working with Microsoft. Japan also reported an impact on government information-system infrastructure, Reuters said.
Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were among the organizations affected. OpenAI and Anthropic separately reported problems with Microsoft connectors, rather than the failure of their entire AI services.
IndiGo and Akasa Air reported disruption to email-support services. There was no basis in that reporting to extend those statements to flight cancellations or unavailable booking systems.
Recovery efforts continue without a confirmed resolution
Microsoft said it was reviewing additional measures to improve infrastructure stability after its server adjustments failed to deliver sustained recovery. Sky News also reported on November 13 that Microsoft said its changes were not taking effect as expected and that it was examining alternative approaches to increase capacity.
Microsoft said it was not aware of malicious activity causing the incident, according to Reuters. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack and compared the problem to an update going wrong. Neither statement constitutes a final technical root-cause report.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Microsoft was working to fix widespread service problems.
Organizations can consult Microsoft’s service-health guidance and incident notices in their Microsoft 365 admin center for information relevant to their own environment.
