The Zhitong Finance App learned that the interruption of Microsoft (MSFT.US) Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services continued to enter the Asia-Pacific region on Friday after affecting thousands of US users. The tech giant is still working to fix the server issues it blamed for the failure.
The failure affected government agencies in Australia, Japan, and the US, as well as companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. This is the second time this year that the Microsoft 365 service has been interrupted, causing concerns from the outside world: repeated failures may cause enterprise customers to question Microsoft's reliability.
Microsoft said in the latest announcement that adjustments have been made to the affected servers, but the adjustments have not brought about continuous recovery; in regions where the adjustments have been implemented, the company has observed that some services have been restored.
“We are studying what additional measures can be taken to improve the stability of the overall infrastructure,” the company said on the X platform.
According to multiple status reports compiled by the fault tracking website Downdetector, at 11:30 p.m. EST (11:30 a.m. on Friday morning Beijing time), the US had more than 18,000 Outlook fault reports; in the early morning of Friday local time, Asia Pacific regions such as India, Australia, and Japan also recorded multiple Microsoft service interruptions. Meanwhile, during the peak period, at around 1 p.m. EST on Thursday, there were at one point more than 130,000 Outlook crash reports in the US. This outage has been going on for about 12 hours.
Microsoft stated in the service health notice that Microsoft 365 features that rely on Exchange Online and email have been affected, and parts that do not rely on Exchange Online are still operating normally. Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform, responsible for mail, calendar, contacts, and task delivery. The company added that “no malicious activity” is currently being detected to cause this outage.
The email system has been impacted
Australian Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believes this incident was not a cyber attack. “They think, in some ways, the situation is similar to what we saw in the CrowdStrike incident before — something went wrong with an update,” Burke said at a press conference.
“The impact they are dealing with... is mainly focused on the mail system,” the minister added. Australia's intelligence agencies and the federal police were also among the agencies affected by Friday's breakdown. The 2024 CrowdStrike failure was one of the largest internet outages in history. It paralyzed technical systems in hospitals, banks, and airports, and highlighted the fragility of global connectivity technology.
The US House of Representatives said the failure affected its users and its engineers are cooperating with Microsoft to deal with it. Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the failure is affecting the Japanese government's information system infrastructure.
Businesses feel the impact
US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic both said they have experienced problems with Microsoft connectors, and Indian airlines Indigo and Akasa Air say their email support services have been affected. The failure also interfered with fund management operations of securities firms, life insurance companies, and investment trust companies in Taiwan. A person familiar with the matter said that one of the companies even cancelled a scheduled bond repurchase agreement transaction, but the person declined to disclose the name of the company.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at the trading platform eToro, said that investors probably won't weigh this failure too much, but repeated interruptions may damage Microsoft in the long run.
“I think investors will respond calmly right now, because in reality, not many customers can leave the Microsoft ecosystem overnight,” Gilbert said.
“The bigger concern is that this isn't the first 365 outage this year. If reliability starts to seem like a recurring issue, it gives every IT department a reason to think twice before putting more business in the hands of a single vendor. Before asking customers to spend more money on Copilot, the market wants to see Microsoft prove that it can keep the system running smoothly.”
Microsoft experienced a 365 service failure in January of this year, as well as once in October of last year. Last month, its Azure cloud platform was disrupted, affecting the entire suite of productivity software and multiple industries around the world.
Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group was originally scheduled to announce the third quarter results on November 12. Due to business interruptions due to a global Microsoft failure, the release has been postponed until November 16.