A failure in part of Microsoft's server infrastructure cut people off from Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 tools for more than a day, with problems reported in 74 countries and territories, according to Euronews. Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyber attack, but banks have already warned that fraudsters may use the disruption to send fake support messages, Insurance Business reports.
A long outage. The disruption began on Thursday 12 November and was still not fully fixed on Friday morning. Euronews says Downdetector registered nearly 140,000 reports on Outlook alone; Insurance Business counted nearly 150,000 combined Outlook reports from the US and Canada by 1:30pm ET on Thursday. Microsoft told Euronews its fixes had so far achieved only "marginal success".
Who was hit. According to the two outlets, the outage affected UK GP practices, Canadian hospitals, US sheriff's offices and courts, Singapore's government and Australia's intelligence agency. IndiGo said its email support was disrupted. Insurance Business noted that no major airline, bank or payment system failures had been linked to the outage as of Thursday evening.
Not a hack. Microsoft said it was not aware of any "malicious activity", and executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outage did not appear to be a cyber attack, Euronews reports. The company has blamed a cascade in which some servers went offline unexpectedly and the rest were overwhelmed. Nothing Microsoft has said suggests customer data has been exposed or lost.
Why it matters
Scammers love outages. According to Insurance Business, banks have warned customers that fraudsters may pose as Microsoft or IT support offering to fix the problem, or send fake password-reset and "restore your account" messages once email returns. Employees anxious to get back to work are exactly the audience those messages target. Euronews adds that Defender XDR, a security tool organisations use to spot threats, was among the affected services, which could make monitoring harder.
- Check Microsoft's official service status page instead of trusting messages about the outage.
- Never log in or reset a password through a link in an email or text.
- Treat any unexpected call claiming to be from Microsoft with suspicion; real support will not ask for remote access.
- Verify outage-related requests through a separate, known channel before sharing credentials or approving a payment.
- Avoid moving work files to personal email or apps while systems are down.
Other risks. Security experts quoted by Insurance Business warn that staff using personal Gmail accounts or free file-sharing sites to keep working may breach privacy rules. Some Australian users also could not access other apps because their multifactor codes arrived by email.
"This outage will make many organisations ask whether they have a real contingency plan if their email and communications go down for a day." — Professor Tommaso Valletti, Imperial Business School, to Euronews
Sources: Euronews, McAfee, Insurance Business
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