Microsoft has announced significant progress in restoring its services across Europe, following a global outage that caused serious disruption to communications at businesses, government departments, hospitals and financial institutions in more than 70 countries.

Despite the gradual improvement, however, disruptions are continuing. The company is also maintaining a 48-hour delivery window for delayed emails in order to reduce the risk of messages being lost.

The widespread outage affecting Outlook and Teams lasted for more than 12 hours on Friday, bringing communications at organisations around the world to a standstill. Some businesses were even forced to return to using fax machines to confirm financial transactions. The disruption also led to the postponement of corporate announcements and at least one bond buyback transaction.

BREAKING: Microsoft services are beginning to come back online after a massive global outage left millions of users without access for nearly 18 hours. The disruption affected businesses, schools and government agencies in at least 74 countries, including the United States. Major services impacted included Outlook email, Microsoft Teams and Copilot. Microsoft says the outage was not caused by a cyberattack but by overwhelmed servers responsible for establishing secure connections, preventing them from processing requests. Download the FOX News app for the latest details: https://t.co/BAyV31y5kz

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 13, 2026

According to Microsoft, the outage was linked to problems with its servers, which primarily affected services associated with Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and calendar platform. Problems were also reported with its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, while applications that do not rely on the affected infrastructure continued to operate.

The company has begun implementing corrective measures across a larger part of its infrastructure, with initial results indicating that systems are stabilising. It has stressed, however, that there is currently no evidence linking the incident to malicious activity or a cyberattack.

Microsoft: ‘Encouraging progress in Europe’ – Latest update

In its latest statement, Microsoft confirmed that the situation in Europe was improving, with an increasing proportion of the affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure returning to service.

‘We are seeing encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across an increasing portion of the affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,’ the company said.

Japan remains comparatively more stable, according to Microsoft, while improvements have also been recorded in North America. Some users may nevertheless continue to experience intermittent disruptions as recovery work proceeds.

‘We are focused on addressing the areas where issues remain and improving service stability across all affected geographies,’ Microsoft said.

Particular emphasis is being placed on reducing queues and the backlog of emails that have yet to be delivered.

‘Reducing email queues and processing backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour delivery window remains in place to protect delayed messages until they can be delivered,’ the company explained.

Microsoft reiterated that ‘there is currently no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident’, and pledged to continue treating the outage as an urgent matter until services are fully restored.

Once the recovery work has been completed, the company will publish a detailed report setting out the underlying causes of the outage and the additional security measures to be implemented to strengthen the protection of its infrastructure.

More than 70 countries affected

The scale of the disruption is reflected in data from the Downdetector platform, which recorded hundreds of thousands of reports of problems from users in more than 70 countries.

The disruptions were not confined to Outlook and Teams, two of the most widely used business communication applications, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Cybersecurity software, file-sharing services and system management tools were also affected. These services are provided by Microsoft alongside applications such as Word and Excel as part of the Microsoft 365 suite.

For millions of workers, the outage meant being unable to send or receive emails, manage calendars or hold online meetings. In several cases, organisations were forced to seek alternative means of communication to keep operating.

Government departments and agencies from Australia and Japan to the United States were affected, while problems were also reported by stockbrokers, insurance organisations and airlines.

Organisations hosting Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than relying exclusively on the company’s cloud infrastructure, were comparatively less affected.

Hospitals and police in Britain face disruption

In Britain, the outage caused serious difficulties for the National Health Service (NHS) and the Metropolitan Police Service in London.

A British government spokesman said the relevant authorities were working with Microsoft to find a solution.

The inability to access email and other services affected the Metropolitan Police’s ability to receive certain crime reports online. However, the force’s response to telephone calls was not affected. According to The Guardian, other local police forces also announced that they were unable to accept incident reports electronically.

Similarly, the NHS was forced to activate alternative procedures, making use of other information systems or even paper records. According to people familiar with the situation, some medical procedures had to be rescheduled because of communication problems.

London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital informed patients that its email service was not working, while clarifying that scheduled medical procedures were continuing as normal.

Financial transactions by fax and postponed bond buybacks

The consequences were particularly serious in the financial sector, where the uninterrupted exchange of information is essential to completing transactions.

European stock exchange operator Euronext reported problems with email communications, warning traders that its electronic mail services were unavailable.

In Taiwan, the outage affected fund management at securities firms, life insurance companies and investment trust companies. According to a source who spoke to Reuters, one of the companies even cancelled a bond buyback transaction because it was unable to communicate.

Another Taiwanese financial company returned to using fax machines to confirm transactions, according to a second source.

Brokers in Singapore and securities firms in India also reported problems, with the interruption to electronic communications causing delays in their day-to-day operations.

Delays to corporate results and customer updates

The outage also disrupted the publication of financial results by listed companies.

British insurer Aviva activated backup systems for its results presentation conference calls, while Danish shipping giant Maersk warned customers that updates would be delayed.

In the United States, electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the announcement of its financial results, which had been scheduled for Thursday, moving it to 16 November.

Swiss luxury goods group Richemont also temporarily delayed the announcement of its first-half results on Friday.

Problems affecting Claude, ChatGPT and airlines

The effects extended to the artificial intelligence sector, with US technology groups OpenAI and Anthropic experiencing problems connecting their services to Microsoft applications.

The disruptions affected tools that allow ChatGPT and Claude to communicate with services such as Outlook and other Microsoft 365 applications.

In the aviation sector, Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said their customer service email operations had been affected, warning of possible delays in communications.

The situation created additional difficulties for an industry in which the rapid flow of information to passengers and business partners is crucial to day-to-day operations.

Paper announcements replace emails in Japan

In Japan, the outage even affected communications between government departments and journalists. The country’s Ministry of Finance announced that it had been unable to receive emails for most of the day.

Without access to email, government ministries were forced to put printed announcements on noticeboards to inform journalists of their daily schedules.

Australia and New Zealand: Intelligence services and visa applications affected

In Australia, organisations experiencing problems included the country’s intelligence service and the Australian Federal Police.

Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft did not suspect a cyberattack, noting that the main effects were concentrated on email systems.

‘The impacts they are experiencing are very much centred on email systems,’ he said.

Problems were also reported at the Reserve Bank of Australia, where Outlook went offline in several departments. However, the bank’s critical operations continued as normal.

In neighbouring New Zealand, immigration services suspended the processing of all visa applications because of the disruptions.

Could email disruption continue over the weekend?

Technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker suggested that problems with email delivery could continue into the weekend.

Speaking to Sky News, he explained that this was ‘largely because what is happening is genuinely very complicated to reverse’.

Another factor complicating the recovery is users’ continued attempts to check whether services have been restored. According to Stokel-Walker, repeated attempts to log in ‘bombard the servers again, making the problem worse’.

He also discussed Microsoft’s decision to extend the email delivery window to 48 hours.

‘Those 48 hours are probably an indication of how long they estimate it could take to process all the backlogs in the system,’ he said.

The extension does not, however, mean that every message will be delivered after 48 hours, or that the recovery will necessarily be completed within that period. It is a measure designed to protect delayed messages while systems work through the accumulated backlog of emails.

Second major outage this year raises questions about reliance on Microsoft

The incident ranks among the longest outages in Microsoft’s history and marks the second major disruption to its services in 2026.

The company experienced problems with Microsoft 365 in January this year, as well as in October 2025.

Last month, there was also an outage affecting its Azure cloud platform, which disrupted Microsoft’s productivity applications and businesses across a range of industries worldwide.

The repeated disruptions have renewed debate about the extent to which the global economy depends on a limited number of technology giants, which provide both the software used in everyday business operations and the cloud infrastructure on which it relies.

Microsoft shares were down 2.6 per cent in pre-market trading, underperforming the broader market. Despite the decline, the stock had gained approximately 8 per cent since the beginning of the year.

‘The biggest concern is that this is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year,’ said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at investment platform eToro.

‘If reliability starts to become a recurring issue, then every IT department will have a reason to think twice before entrusting an even greater part of its business operations to a single provider,’ he added.

Some analysts, however, question whether incidents of this kind can genuinely drive customers towards competing services, given that replacing tools so deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of businesses entails high costs and significant organisational challenges.

Despite the gradual restoration of services announced by Microsoft, a full return to normal remains the main priority, particularly for organisations still experiencing problems with communications and email management.