A global Microsoft outage has disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services for more than 12 hours, affecting businesses, government agencies, financial institutions and airlines across several continents.
The disruption has also spread to third-party AI services, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude reporting problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors.
The trouble began on Thursday in the Americas and spread globally within an hour. Outage reports reached 74 countries and territories in that time, according to Downdetector, which recorded a tenfold jump in UK reports at 17:43 UTC, followed by surges in India and New Zealand as their workdays began.
Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, the company’s executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said on X that there was no indication the disruption resulted from malicious or cyber activity.
@MSFT365Status We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.
— Charles Lamanna (@clamanna) November 13, 2026
However, restoring services has proved more difficult than initially expected. After reporting positive results from its recovery measures, Microsoft said overnight that traffic rerouting and strategic blocking were delivering only partial improvements, rather than sustained recovery.
The outage has had consequences well beyond Microsoft’s own products. Bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong told CNN they had been unable to access email and Teams throughout the day.
Japan’s government returned to paper-based processes after ministries struggled to send emails for much of Friday. Australia’s spy agency and federal police were also among the affected organisations.
The Philippine Supreme Court warned of delays, while Australian schools and courts reported email disruptions. US city governments, including Miami Beach and Austin, asked residents to use phone services instead. A Colorado sheriff’s office said the outage had delayed bond payments for prisoners.
Airlines including IndiGo and Akasa lost email support channels, while electric vehicle maker Workhorse postponed its earnings call because of business disruptions. Financial institutions, including Standard Chartered and ING Australia, also warned customers about scammers impersonating technical support staff and attempting to exploit the disruption.
ChatGPT and Claude also affected by Microsoft outage
The disruption has extended to AI services that rely on Microsoft’s productivity infrastructure. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have reported problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors, which allow their AI assistants to access workplace information such as emails, calendars, Teams conversations and SharePoint files.
OpenAI said it was investigating elevated errors affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. The company warned that new connections could fail and that existing tools might not work as expected.
Anthropic reported similar problems with Claude’s Microsoft 365 connector. Mail, calendar and search requests were failing for most users, while some users were also unable to open Claude for Outlook or use its mail and calendar functions.
Anthropic traced the problem to an upstream provider and subsequently confirmed that it was caused by the Microsoft 365 service incident.
The disruption does not mean that ChatGPT or Claude are entirely offline. The problems concern their connections to Microsoft’s services, rather than their underlying AI models. Anthropic’s status page lists the Claude API and Claude Code as operational, although Claude.ai and Claude Cowork have also been reporting degraded performance.
The incidents illustrate how an outage affecting a major productivity platform can spread to third-party applications and AI assistants that depend on its infrastructure.
Microsoft outage raises questions about cloud infrastructure dependence
The likely cause of the disruption remains under investigation. Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft believed it was dealing with something similar to the CrowdStrike incident in 2024, describing it as an update that had gone wrong, according to CNN.
Microsoft has not confirmed that explanation as the root cause, and its investigation has focused on affected servers and recent configuration changes, while its recovery efforts have centred on restoring capacity and stabilising the infrastructure.
The timing is particularly pointed for Europe, where the outage coincided with EU leaders meeting in Dublin to discuss reducing the continent’s dependence on foreign technology providers.
The 2024 CrowdStrike incident exposed the risks of relying on a small number of technology providers for critical services. The latest Microsoft disruption adds another example of how problems at a single infrastructure provider can affect organisations across industries and countries, including services built by other technology companies.
For businesses relying on Microsoft 365, the incident also raises questions about contingency planning. When email, calendars and workplace collaboration tools become unavailable, organisations can quickly lose access to the systems they depend on to communicate with customers, employees and partners.
As Microsoft’s recovery efforts continue, the outage is a reminder that cloud-based productivity services are interconnected, and that a failure in one part of the ecosystem can have consequences far beyond the company experiencing the technical problem.