The Microsoft outage that began Thursday has stretched into Friday morning, leaving Outlook, Teams and Copilot unreachable for millions of users at businesses and government agencies across the globe. Microsoft claims it is making “encouraging recovery process” but has not fully repaired the systems that many organizations rely on to conduct business.
The New York Post reports that Microsoft said the disruption stemmed from server problems and that it had seen no signs of a cyberattack. By Friday, the company reported “signs of stabilization” after rolling out fixes more broadly. By then the outage had already rippled through trading firms, airlines, shipping companies and government offices on multiple continents.
Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States were among those affected. Australia’s spy agency and federal police were caught up in the outage, and the U.S. House of Representatives said its users had been hit, with engineers working alongside Microsoft to resolve the problem. Tony Burke, Australia’s Cyber Security Minister, described the scope of the damage: “The impact that they are dealing with … is very much on email systems.”
That email disruption, tied to Microsoft’s Exchange Online messaging platform, which handles email, calendar, contacts and tasks, became the common thread across industries. Microsoft said in a service health notice that 365 features dependent on Exchange Online and email had gone down, while features that didn’t rely on it kept working.
Financial markets took the hardest hit. Euronext, which operates several European stock exchanges, said its listing teams had trouble communicating by email. Switzerland’s Richemont briefly delayed its first-half results announcement on Friday, and electric truck maker Workhorse Group pushed its results, originally due Thursday, back to November 16. Britain’s Aviva activated backup plans to keep its earnings call on track. In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. One Taiwanese company canceled a bond repurchase transaction, according to a person familiar with the matter, and a second source said another Taiwanese financial firm resorted to fax machines to confirm trades.
Airlines struggled with the email outage as well. IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India all reported that email support services had been affected, and other carriers warned customers of delayed communications. Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, told customers to expect delays in emails and updates. Even AI companies were not spared: OpenAI and Anthropic both said they ran into problems with Microsoft connectors during the outage.
This is the second time this year that Microsoft 365 services have failed on this scale. Similar outages hit the platform in January 2026 and in October of the prior year, and just last month Microsoft reported an Azure cloud platform outage that also struck its productivity software suite and affected industries worldwide.
So companies are starting to ask the obvious question: what happens when one provider runs this much of the world’s back office? Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said the pattern matters more than any single outage. “The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands,” Gilbert said.
Outages are still reported as of 7:00 EST as America begins its workday.
Read more at the New York Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
