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IT Home reported on November 13 that Microsoft 365 core services, including Microsoft's Outlook and Teams, suffered a large-scale global outage early this morning.
Data from monitoring site Downdetector showed that reports of Outlook problems at one point approached 130,000. The outage lasted several hours and affected government agencies and business users in multiple countries and regions.
The Japanese government was among the public-sector organizations affected. According to a CCTV News report today, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed at a press conference that the Government Solution Service (GSS), a shared government information platform operated by the Digital Agency (IT Home note: it provides standardized office computers and network environments for Japan's ministries and agencies), had experienced a failure. Email software including Outlook used by the agencies stopped working, affecting some operations. A government source told the media, “Kasumigaseki (where Japan's central government ministries and agencies are concentrated) is in considerable turmoil.”
Japan's Digital Minister Toshiharu Furukawa said that, as an emergency response, multiple means of communication, including telephone, chat tools and text messages, had been secured: “We are currently maintaining operations through these means to prevent disruptions to government business.” Ozaki also said he had been informed that Microsoft was working on recovery and that the government would closely monitor its progress.
Microsoft's explanation of the cause pointed to a cascading infrastructure failure. Microsoft initially reported “high load on infrastructure in multiple regions,” but a subsequent investigation ruled out a surge in traffic and confirmed that a substantial number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining servers.
Those servers failed automated health checks and were therefore marked offline. Microsoft's mitigation measures included pausing all deployments and configuration changes, redistributing connection traffic to other infrastructure, restarting affected servers, and testing an alternative health-check approach to speed recovery.
Although the relevant Microsoft teams have been doing everything they can to fix the problem, Microsoft 365 service availability has still not improved significantly as of now, and Microsoft has not announced a definite time for full recovery.
Microsoft's latest update says that, faced with a continuing imbalance in traffic distribution, the company is looking for other viable ways to increase service capacity.
The outage also affected connectivity components relied on by OpenAI and Anthropic's AI services. Australia's Home Affairs Minister said the Australian government had activated relevant protocols to ensure it received priority handling when Microsoft services were restored.
Related reading:
“Microsoft 365 core services hit by large-scale global outage: Outlook, OneDrive and Teams all affected; gradual restarts underway to restore service”