Microsoft has failed to restore its main workplace services more than 12 hours after a global outage cut millions of users off from email and online meetings.
Problems began at about 4pm GMT on November 12, when users reported they could not access Outlook. Within an hour, outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories, with Outlook complaints peaking at almost 140,000 around 6pm GMT, according to Reuters.
Microsoft said Teams, Copilot, Exchange Online, SharePoint and its Defender XDR security tool were also affected. Early today the company described its progress as “marginal success”, while servers it had brought back online were reported to be failing again.
The US company said infrastructure in several regions had come under elevated load and some servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, though traffic had not increased. It was also rolling back a network change but did not say whether this had caused the problem.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president for Copilot, wrote on X that “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.
In Europe, German rail operator Deutsche Bahn reported significant delays to its internal communications. Stock exchange operator Euronext advised listed companies to use the telephone for corporate announcements, Reuters reported.
At Westminster, MPs lost access to Microsoft products through their parliamentary accounts, according to the BBC. In Australia, the national intelligence agency and federal police were among the organisations hit.
In an update at about 10am GMT today, Microsoft said users might still be unable to connect to several Microsoft 365 products and gave no timeline for full recovery. The disruption followed a near 10-hour Microsoft 365 outage across North America in January and a worldwide Outlook lockout in August.
The outage came as the European Union sought to cut its reliance on US technology providers. Amazon, Microsoft and Google control more than 70 per cent of the European cloud market, according to industry estimates.
In June, the European Commission presented a Technological Sovereignty Package that would rate cloud providers by their level of sovereignty and in effect exclude US firms from the most sensitive tiers. Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen said at the time: “We want to make sure that nobody has a so-called kill switch.”
Late in 2025, a cross-party group of MEPs led by Austrian liberal Helmut Brandstätter urged the European Parliament to drop Microsoft software, describing its dependence on non-European technology as a strategic vulnerability.
Technology analyst Rupert Goodwins told Al Jazeera that pressure to find alternatives to Microsoft had been building in Europe and that “this sort of thing will only increase the pressure”. He added that no European firm could yet offer a credible replacement.
