Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Businesses and Public Services Worldwide
Since the evening of Thursday, November 12, a massive outage affecting Microsoft 365 cloud services—including Outlook email—has caused widespread disruptions around the world. As of Friday morning, November 13, 2026, the incident impacting the American tech giant's online tools still had not been resolved.
The outage has paralyzed a majority of organizations that rely heavily on the American company's tools: businesses, governments, schools, hospitals, and more.
Government agencies and public services brought to a halt
In New Zealand, the government warned that embassy and consulate email systems were disrupted, and immigration services announced they were suspending new visa applications because they could not process those already submitted.
The Japanese government acknowledged that its information systems were affected. In the Philippines, the Supreme Court also reported difficulties sending and receiving emails.
In the United States, several major cities—including Miami Beach, Austin, Burbank, and Pasadena—reported that their administrations could no longer access email. On social network X, Baltimore County advised, "If you need assistance, contact the appropriate department by phone," while assuring that the 911 emergency number was still working properly.
At many companies, employees reported being unable to use certain non-Microsoft tools. The reason: these services require authentication via a code sent by email, which users could no longer receive.
With summer vacation taking place in December and January in Australia, local media shared stories of panicked students. As they prepared for their year-end exams, they found themselves unable to access their online courses.
In Australia, patients and doctors at some hospitals reported difficulties with care, especially when trying to access prescriptions sent by email.
In India, problems caused by the Microsoft outage led to the cancellation of a few flights, though overall air traffic was not severely disrupted. In Australia, according to ABC News, a traveler said her flight was delayed because the captain was not receiving flight documents by email. Also speaking to ABC News, a Melbourne resident said he missed a job interview because he could not connect to the Teams videoconferencing platform.
Reactions and past incidents
On social media, some employees joked about the situation, seeing it as a welcome break from their daily flood of emails. "To anyone working to fix the Microsoft outage," one user posted on X, "take your time!" This outage is the most significant incident to hit Microsoft since the 2024 episode involving the CrowdStrike tool.
This article was automatically translated from French. Read the original version: https://www.journaldunet.com/business/1557967-une-panne-de-microsoft-365-paralyse-des-organisations-dans-de-nombreux-pays/