Microsoft fails to restore services after more than 12 hours of global disruption

Microsoft reported early on Friday that it was still struggling to recover from the global outage affecting its services. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the incident, as the company continued its efforts on Friday to restore normal operations.The affected products include Outlook email, the Teams platform, SharePoint Online, the Copilot artificial intelligence chatbot, and the cloud services OneDrive and OneNote, among others.“For now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Lamanna — Microsoft’s executive vice-president of Copilot, Agents and Platforms at the world’s largest software company — posted in a message on Z.In its latest update, the company struck a more optimistic note: “We’re seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions. We’re implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery.”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 Complaints from users on the specialist platform Downdetector reached an initial peak shortly after 7 pm on Thursday, Spanish peninsular time, with problems reported in more than 70 countries. A second wave of incidents began at around 7 a.m. Friday morning and is currently twice as large, in terms of reported volume, as the one recorded on Thursday afternoon.Australia and Japan particularly hard hitAustralia woke up on Friday to the same disruption that Spain experienced on Thursday afternoon. The outage has caused problems for businesses, which have struggled to communicate, process orders and send invoices, as well as for public bodies and services, including the Australian Taxation Office and some courts. In response, the authorities have invoked a clause in the country’s digital resilience agreement with Microsoft, asking the company to give Australia’s interests priority as it restores services affected by the global outage at the U.S. tech giant.Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Friday that the government had activated the provision to ensure the country’s needs were taken into account as systems were brought back online. According to EFE, the agreement, signed in June, provides for measures to strengthen the resilience of Australia’s digital infrastructure and prioritise the recovery of its economy in the event of a major disruption to Microsoft’s ecosystem.The outage has also affected Japan’s government administration. The country’s chief government spokesperson, Minoru Kihara, told Reuters that the problems were largely related to communications and that no incidents had been reported at healthcare facilities.According to figures released by Microsoft itself, the affected Microsoft 365 service has more than 450 million corporate users and 95 million individual customers. Teams, the platform for video conferencing and other workplace functions, has more than 320 million users.In its previous updates on its official X account, the company said it was continuing to work to stabilize its servers and improve traffic flow. Although it reported a partial recovery in the regions where it had implemented these measures, Microsoft acknowledged that they were “not resulting in a sustained recovery” and said it was looking into what further steps it could take to stabilize its infrastructure.According to Microsoft, the problem was not caused by an unexpected increase in traffic due to heavier user activity. Instead, several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, forcing the remaining servers to take on their workload. This triggered a domino effect that eventually overwhelmed the systems. There is not yet a definitive analysis of the cause, but the only thing that appears clear is that the problem affects services “that interact with Exchange Online and email.” This is why it also disrupted Teams, SharePoint and Copilot, which are linked to the email service, while those that do not depend on Exchange have continued to work.The company said it has “alternate workstreams” underway to reduce the impact of the outage and restore stability to parts of its infrastructure. In its latest update, Microsoft said it is continuing efforts to recover its frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization measures to improve stability and capacity. The company has not provided an estimated time for a full resolution.Microsoft confirmed on Thursday afternoon in Spain that its 365 platform was experiencing a global outage. The company announced on X that it was investigating an incident preventing some users from accessing their Exchange Online mailboxes — the email service included in its cloud-based office suite — as well as services such as Copilot. The company explained that the problems were affecting several connection methods.Microsoft’s initial notice suggested that the problem was limited to the Americas. However, the company later confirmed that the outage could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users “in any region.” Microsoft said that parts of its infrastructure were experiencing high levels of demand across numerous countries, which was likely contributing to connection errors.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition