Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Governments and Services in 74 Countries
Microsoft restored global services after a server failure disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot for millions of users across 74 countries, impacting critical government and health infrastructure.
A massive global outage of Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, disrupted millions of users across 74 countries starting November 12, 2026. Microsoft Corporation attributed the failure to a network capacity upgrade that caused a core process to become overwhelmed, leading to a cascade of server health-check failures and subsequent infrastructure overload. The company explicitly ruled out malicious cyber activity, with executives likening the event to a faulty update similar to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident.
The disruption crippled critical infrastructure worldwide. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (UK) faced a backlog in 111 and 999 patient referrals, and some patients were unable to receive prescriptions. Law enforcement agencies, including Police Scotland and various English forces, lost the ability to process online crime reports. In Australia, the outage affected the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, prompting the government to activate a formal cyber agreement to prioritize the restoration of Australian interests.
Other global impacts included disruptions to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and government IT platforms in Japan and Singapore. Financial markets in Japan and Taiwan reverted to fax machines and manual processes to maintain trading. AI providers OpenAI and Anthropic also reported broken connectors to Microsoft 365, hindering their tools' functionality.
Microsoft began a gradual recovery on November 13 by pausing deployments, rerouting traffic, and deploying an authentication patch. To prevent data loss, the company extended the email timeout window to 48 hours. While services stabilized, the event sparked international debate over digital sovereignty and the risks of over-reliance on a few technology providers.
