Microsoft Reports Progress in Asia Pacific as Global Outage Drags On

New Delhi/Sydney: Microsoft said on Friday it had made further progress in restoring services after a global outage hit Outlook, Teams and Copilot. Recovery actions are complete across parts of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region, but some users may still see intermittent problems.

The company said traffic is being gradually restored and that key scenarios such as mailbox access and delayed email processing are improving. It is now working to extend these recovery actions to affected infrastructure in other regions. It is also continuing stabilisation work and adding supporting capacity to “improve service consistency”.

The Microsoft 365 failure began on Thursday, November 12, and kept email and dependent services degraded into Friday’s Asia-Pacific business hours. Microsoft blamed server problems and said it was working to fix them, with only partial success. It said adjustments to the affected servers had not produced sustained recovery, though it saw partial recovery in the regions where they were applied. Reports said servers dropped out again after restarts. The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the outage.

Downdetector said the outage reached 74 countries within an hour. Reports across five Microsoft services peaked at 19,650 per minute, against fewer than 15 on a typical Thursday. In the United States, Outlook problem reports peaked at more than 130,000 around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. Microsoft’s status pages showed outages in Asia-Pacific countries including India, Australia and Japan early on Friday local time.

The disruption hit government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. It also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. It is the second disruption to Microsoft’s 365 services this year, which has raised concerns that repeated failures could push corporate clients to question the company’s reliability.