The key facts

  • On the afternoon of November 13, Downdetector recorded a mass outage of Microsoft services — complaints from 74 countries arrived within an hour
  • The problems affected Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Store and Copilot in India, Germany, the Netherlands, France and other countries
  • The WHO suggested users spend the outage offline: stretching, a walk and face-to-face communication

Massive Outage of Microsoft Services

On the afternoon of November 13, the Downdetector platform recorded a large-scale outage of Microsoft services. Users reported problems with Outlook email in India, Germany, the Netherlands, France and a number of other countries. Disruptions were also observed in Microsoft 365, Teams, Store and Copilot. According to Downdetector, complaints from around the world came in within just one hour, and in total the outages affected users from 74 countries.

WHO Advice: Spend the Outage Offline

Amid the downtime, the World Health Organization published a post on the social network X with recommendations for those affected by the outage. “Email not working? Here are a few ideas on how to stay healthy in offline mode,” the message said. The organization suggested taking a break from screens, doing some stretching, going for a walk and talking with other people.

Market Reaction

The outage coincided with a drop in Microsoft shares: earlier the same day, reports of malfunctions in the company's services sent its stock tumbling. The cause of the outage and the timeframe for full restoration of the services were not reported in available publications.