A worldwide Microsoft outage disrupted government services, banking communications, healthcare and businesses across the Pacific and other regions on Friday, 13 November, leaving organisations unable to access email and other online systems.
The problems began in the United States on Thursday, 12 November, and spread rapidly, affecting Outlook, Exchange Online and functions connected to Teams, SharePoint and Copilot. Outage monitoring service Downdetector recorded reports from 74 countries and territories within an hour of the first problems emerging.
In Fiji, the Land Transport Authority and the Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission reported service interruptions and warned customers about difficulties accessing their systems.
The Cook Islands government experienced problems accessing Outlook email, leaving departments unable to receive or respond to some messages. Officials advised people with urgent matters to contact ministries by telephone.
In Tonga, the National Reserve Bank issued a public notice warning that financial institutions using Microsoft Outlook were experiencing email problems. Customers unable to contact commercial banks electronically were advised to telephone them.
Guam’s Department of Public Health and Social Services reported that employees could not access emails containing applications, documents and public requests. Residents requiring assistance were directed to government offices or telephone services.
New Zealand was also affected. Immigration New Zealand temporarily lost access to its application systems and subsequently postponed several planned immigration changes from 16 November to 23 November.
In Britain, a criminal trial in Manchester was halted after technical problems interrupted proceedings. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home because the court could not continue as scheduled.
British police also reported difficulties receiving online crime reports and advised the public to telephone urgent matters.
Healthcare services experienced problems when Microsoft’s email systems became unavailable. The National Pharmacy Association warned that patients could face delays obtaining prescriptions, while some National Health Service operations were affected by difficulties sending prescriptions electronically to pharmacies.
In the United States, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado reported that online bond payments had been affected.
Government departments in Japan, Singapore, Greece and Norway also reported interruptions to their operations. Banks in Hong Kong experienced disruptions, while some businesses were unable to receive correspondence from overseas customers.
Artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools during the outage.
Microsoft traced the incident to a problem introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a subsequent network change.
Numerous servers became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks, placing additional demand on the remaining infrastructure. Engineers attempted to restart affected servers, but some stopped responding again when normal customer traffic returned.
Recovery required network configuration changes, traffic management, server restarts and additional computing capacity.
Microsoft said it found no evidence of malicious activity and confirmed that the disruption was unrelated to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.
Services were gradually restored, with Microsoft confirming on Saturday, 14 November, that the remaining affected customers and regions were back online.
The company has not established a verified total for the number of people affected. Microsoft reported more than 450 million paid commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions earlier this year, although this figure does not represent the number affected by the outage.
There have been no independently confirmed reports identifying specific government agencies or businesses in Samoa affected by the incident.
