Microsoft Outlook back online after global outage
Check your emails!
Microsoft Outlook is officially back online after experiencing a major outage for nearly an entire day in different parts of the world.
Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 were hit by the outage Friday morning, Nov. 13, Philippine time.
As of 11:00 p.m. on the same day, the email program under the Microsoft 365 software suite is again able to receive and refresh emails.
The outage disrupted public services and businesses around the world.
A top UK trade union said the disruptions were having a "serious impact" on the country's health care service. National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls were "unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos," said Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union.
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In London's financial district, several people interviewed by AFP said the outage exposed their reliance on Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.
Airlines in India warned that customer queries were not getting through, and New Zealand said the outage forced a halt in the processing of visa applications. Japan also cautioned the impact would be broad.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The tech giant noted that it was "not aware of any malicious activity that [was] causing this incident."
A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
Thousands of users also reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector. (with reports from AFP)
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