Microsoft outage drags past 12 hours, hitting banks, courts and schools in 74 countries
Global Microsoft Outage
A massive Microsoft outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and other office staples for millions worldwide, spreading from the Americas to 74 countries and territories within about an hour, according to Downdetector. Banks in Hong Kong, government services in Japan, courts in the Philippines and schools in Australia were all disrupted. Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyberattack and no sustained recovery yet.
They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry.
- mmoustafa
Still ongoing, I haven't been able to access my personal outlook email for 12+ hours and as a result can't access my accounts that use email 2FA, including my virtual medical appointment!
Along with the daily Github outages recently, it's making me do an audit of my dependence on Microsoft.
- Ungh
I've had two ex-colleagues contact me this morning in UK government positions and tell me that they're still out of action with no plan B in place.
I hope this sort of stuff pushes us to a distributed model rather than a centralised mono-provider one.
- MisterMunchkin
It’s mental that the entire thing is centralised. Why don’t big clients have their own servers? They’re paying a fortune every year.
The fact that the government can get taken down by a central server is mental.
Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence?
- SubiculumCode
Also, while they claim it is not a cybersecurity attack (without saying how they know), these are exactly the kinds of things I would expect with the soon/maybenowww future of automated hacking agents wrecking world's cyber infrastructure. Right now, its embarrassing, when it happens to the banks, it will be something more than that.
- psim1
Would a secondary MX be useful here, at least for the receiving of mail?
How feasible would it be to quickly stand up an SMTP server and point your MX to it and get some mail while the outage is ongoing?
- butwhentho
I went to a bank branch here in India today, and apparently their entire email + a bunch of other services are down. This is one of India's biggest banks.
Second-order effects of this are immense.
- apt-apt-apt-apt
I remember there was a comment from a MSFT-er talking about how unreliable Azure is. Combined with AI coding, is the whole thing collapsing under its own complexity and weight?
- Steve44
We're seeing problems delivering to MS customers now. I'm not sure if it's they are full, busy, or perhaps rate-limiting to try and slow the deluge.
Last Error: 451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later. PRX3 NextHop: substrate-int.office.com. Last IP: [MI3PEPF00008491.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T10:15:37.721Z
Last Error: 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent server connections has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel [MI3PEPF00008487.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T10:42:55.252Z ]
We're also seeing messages about alternate failover failing.