Microsoft Outage Reaches UK Hospitals, Australia's Spy Agency and the US House as Recovery Stays Partial

Since Microsoft's Exchange Online problems began shortly after noon ET on Thursday, Nov. 12, the outage has moved well beyond inboxes. By Friday, Nov. 13, it had reached hospitals, police, courts, a spy agency and a national visa system.

Microsoft said in its latest update that it is seeing "early signs of stabilisation after implementing fixes more broadly to attain a persistent recovery of services." It added that "service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced."

The company says it has found no evidence of malicious activity. Executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the same in a post on X.

Governments and security agencies

Australia's domestic spy agency and federal police were both hit. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess and AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed it at a news conference.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him it does not believe a cyberattack caused the outage. He said Microsoft compared the incident to the July 2024 CrowdStrike failure.

Burke also said Australia has activated a cyber agreement with Microsoft to put Australian interests first in the restoration queue. "The first of those" formal agreements he signed on Australia's behalf was with Microsoft, he said.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed the government's IT infrastructure was affected. Trade minister Ryosei Akazawa told the Asahi Shimbun there was no doubt of a "significant impact."

The US House of Representatives confirmed its users were affected and said its engineers were working with Microsoft. Singapore's GovTech said government systems were hit.

Immigration New Zealand paused processing of all visa applications. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals said its clerk's office was unable to send or receive email for much of Thursday and that notices of docket activity may be delayed. Phone and live chat stayed open.

Hospitals, police and pharmacies in Britain

NHS sources described "widespread" and "serious" disruption to The Guardian. Staff arriving Friday could not reach email, and meetings were cancelled. Some staff could still use Teams on their phones.

GMB national secretary Rachel Harrison said the outage is having "a serious impact across ambulance and NHS trusts." She added that emergency and life-threatening callouts appear to be unaffected.

The National Pharmacy Association warned that pharmacies cannot easily communicate with GP practices and some patients. It said waits may be longer and some prescriptions delayed.

Some police departments are asking the public to report crimes by phone instead of email or online. A UK government spokesman said contingency plans are in place. Defence readiness minister Luke Pollard told Times Radio that government engineers are working with Microsoft to assess the impact.

Business and the AI dependency

In Arapahoe County, Colorado, the sheriff's office said jail staff were not receiving the email notifications needed to process online bond payments. Anyone seeking immediate release had to pay in person.

Workhorse Group moved its third-quarter results from Nov. 12 to Nov. 16, citing the outage. Aviva said it was putting backup plans in place for its earnings calls. Euronext said its listing teams had email problems, and Maersk warned customers of delayed emails and updates.

In India, SpiceJet cancelled three Delhi departures on Friday, and IndiGo said it might not receive customer emails. Air India said flight operations were unaffected and that it had rerouted email traffic. In Hong Kong, bankers at firms including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs told CNN they were locked out of email and Teams, with sporadic delivery and a possible backlog of millions of messages.

OpenAI and Anthropic both said their connectors to Microsoft 365 were failing. A mail outage at Microsoft also took down rival AI tools that read users' inboxes.

What Microsoft has said about the cause

Microsoft said the elevated load on its systems was "not driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable." That strained the remaining infrastructure. It paused deployments, shifted traffic and restarted servers.

Those steps did not hold. An early Friday update said the company had seen "marginal success." Another said the applied changes were "not taking as expected," and that Microsoft was identifying alternate workstreams to add capacity against "sustained traffic management imbalances."

About 30 minutes later, Microsoft reported improved stability and capacity from its traffic optimization measures.

Downdetector logged reports from 74 countries and territories within about an hour. It recorded more than 130,000 US Outlook reports at the peak and about 43,000 Outlook reports around 07:00 GMT Friday. Those are user-submitted reports, not a count of affected customers.

Microsoft 365 has more than 430 million users, according to figures cited in coverage of the outage.

What comes next

Microsoft says it will publish a post-incident report on the root cause and corrective measures once the outage is resolved. It has not given a time for full restoration. Why so many servers became unavailable at once is the open question that report is supposed to answer.