Overview
- Microsoft said the outage began on Nov. 12 when a large number of servers failed automated health checks and became unavailable, which overloaded other capacity and spread service disruptions across roughly 70–74 countries.
- The incident blocked or delayed access to Exchange Online, Outlook, Teams, Copilot and related Microsoft 365 features for many users and organisations before engineers restarted affected servers, stopped routine changes, redistributed traffic and gradually restored service.
- Critical bodies including Australia’s ASIO and the AFP reported impact and the Australian government activated a pre‑existing cybersecurity agreement with Microsoft to prioritise restoration for national services.
- Microsoft confirmed there is no evidence the outage was caused by a cyber‑attack, said services were fully restored by Nov. 14, and pledged a detailed post‑incident root‑cause report.
- After restoration Microsoft Threat Intelligence warned of phishing campaigns exploiting the outage, published malicious sender domains to block, and urged users not to click links in fake service notifications.