Microsoft outage lasted more than 22 hours and affected more than 70 countries

A global outage in Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, lasted over 22 hours and affected more than 70 countries. The cause was routine automated checks that took part of the servers out of service. The US Congress, Australian intelligence agencies, Singapore's courts and Indian airlines were left without email.

Aziz KarimovFirst published on tafs uz 13 November 2026 at 22:442 min read

The key facts

The Microsoft 365 outage lasted more than 22 hours, with problems reported in more than 70 countries
The cause was routine automated checks that overloaded the remaining servers
Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack and apologized; recovery proceeded gradually for the sake of stability

What happened

A critical outage in Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, lasted more than 22 hours. According to the company, the cause was routine automated checks that took part of the servers out of service, overloading the rest with traffic. Recovery took almost a full day: engineers restored services gradually because, according to a Microsoft representative, 'given the scale of demand' this approach 'helped ensure a stable recovery.' The company apologized and stated that this was a technical malfunction, not a cyberattack. Later, Microsoft reported that email queues were 'approaching normal levels' and that it was studying the causes of the outage to prevent something similar in the future.

Scale of the consequences

Microsoft 365 is used by about 430 million people worldwide, and reports of problems came from more than 70 countries. The outage disabled the email systems of the US House of Representatives and Australian intelligence agencies, disrupted the work of courts in Singapore and airline support services in India. Flora Hamilton, executive director of Small Business Charter, called what happened 'a stark reminder' of how dependent companies are on digital systems: for many small and medium-sized businesses, access to email is fundamental — from communicating with customers and suppliers to generating revenue.

Questions about infrastructure resilience

Experts pointed to the vulnerability exposed by the outage. AI strategist Walter Pasquarelli said that for governments, businesses and critical infrastructure the incident 'clearly demonstrated their vulnerabilities and dependence,' and warned that as AI assistants are connected to email, calendars and files, similar outages could spread even more widely. Gergely Orosz, a former lead engineer at major technology companies, noted that such outages are not rare in themselves — what was unusual was precisely the length of the recovery. He linked what happened to dependence on a few large American corporations and suggested a possible solution: splitting services by region to reduce the scale of consequences, as is already practiced in Amazon's AWS cloud service.