Microsoft's technical problems affected companies and government institutions around the world

A major outage of Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, continued to affect users on Friday as the working day began in the Asia-Pacific region, after thousands of American users experienced access difficulties. The technology giant is trying to fix the server problems it believes are responsible for the incident, but the measures implemented so far have failed to restore normal service operations, Reuters reports.

According to the cited source, the failure affected government institutions in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as major companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic. This is the second major Microsoft 365 service outage this year, a situation that is fueling concerns about the reliability of the company's infrastructure and the risk that repeated problems could prompt corporate customers to reassess their dependence on the Microsoft ecosystem.

In its latest update, Microsoft announced that it had made adjustments to the affected servers, but the interventions had not resulted in a stable recovery of services. The company stated that it had observed partial improvements in the regions where the changes had been implemented.

Microsoft representatives said, through the X platform, that they were examining additional measures to improve the overall stability of the infrastructure.

According to Downdetector, a platform that monitors digital service outages by aggregating reports from multiple sources, more than 18,000 reports concerning Outlook's operation had been registered in the United States on Thursday at 11:30 p.m. local time (04:30 GMT). The platform also indicated problems with several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, during the early hours of Friday morning.

The incident reached its peak on Thursday, around 1:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, when Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports concerning Outlook. The service outage had already lasted approximately 12 hours.

In a service status notification, Microsoft explained that Microsoft 365 functionalities dependent on Exchange Online and email systems had been affected, while components that do not use this infrastructure continued to operate. Exchange Online is Microsoft's cloud-based messaging platform, through which email, calendar, contact management and task management services are provided.

The company emphasized that, so far, it has no information indicating that malicious activity was behind the incident.

• Government institutions' email systems affected by the failure

Australian Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security Tony Burke stated that, according to Microsoft's assessments, the incident was not believed to be the result of a cyberattack.

During a press conference, the Australian official explained that Microsoft believes it is facing a situation similar to the one caused by CrowdStrike, in which a faulty software update generated widespread technical problems.

Burke specified that the effects of the incident were concentrated particularly on email systems.

Among the Australian institutions affected on Friday were the national intelligence agency and the federal police.

The comparison with the 2024 CrowdStrike incident brings the vulnerabilities of global technological infrastructure back into focus. The failure at that time represented one of the largest IT disruptions ever recorded, affecting systems used by hospitals, banks and airports and highlighting the risks associated with the interconnected nature of digital services.

In the United States, the House of Representatives confirmed that its users had been affected by the outage, stating that technical teams were working with Microsoft to resolve the problems.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told the press that the failure was affecting the infrastructure of government IT systems.

• Companies in the technology, transportation and financial services sectors feel the effects of the outage

Microsoft's problems spread across several economic sectors, from artificial intelligence and air transportation to financial services and investment management.

American artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic announced difficulties in using Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported disruptions to their email customer support services.

In Taiwan, the incident affected fund management activities carried out by securities firms, life insurance companies and investment management firms.

The impact was severe enough for one of the affected companies to cancel a previously scheduled bond repurchase transaction, according to a source familiar with the situation cited by Reuters. The source declined to reveal the identity of the company involved.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, believes that investors will most likely move past this incident without major reactions, but warns that repeated failures could affect Microsoft in the long term.

According to the analyst, most corporate customers have no realistic possibility of quickly abandoning the Microsoft ecosystem, which limits the immediate impact of the outage on the company.

However, Gilbert points out that the fundamental problem is the recurring nature of the incidents. Another Microsoft 365 service outage could prompt corporate IT departments to reconsider the wisdom of concentrating an increasing share of their activities within infrastructure managed by a single provider.

The analyst believes that the market will wait for concrete evidence of Microsoft's ability to ensure service continuity before the technology giant asks customers to make additional investments in solutions such as Copilot.

• Repeated outages raise questions about the reliability of Microsoft's infrastructure

The current incident is part of a series of technical problems that have affected Microsoft services in recent months.

The company experienced a Microsoft 365 service outage in January this year, following a similar incident in October last year.

Also, last month, Microsoft reported a failure of its Azure cloud platform, which disrupted the operation of productivity applications and affected the activities of companies across numerous industries worldwide.

The consequences of the current outage are also reflected in the financial reporting schedules of some American companies.

Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group, which was scheduled to present its third-quarter financial results on November 12, decided to postpone their publication until November 16, citing operational disruptions caused by the global Microsoft service outage.

The recurrence of technical incidents highlights the risks associated with companies' and public institutions' dependence on a limited number of digital infrastructure providers. Although migrating to alternative solutions involves high costs and complex processes, availability problems could become an increasingly important factor in the technology investment decisions of major organizations.