It has been 24 hours since Microsoft’s global outage began, which has caused serious problems for email services and other applications in at least 74 countries.
Greece is among the countries where there have been reports of minor issues.
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
First Signs of Stabilization
At noon on Friday (11/13), the company announced that the first signs of stabilization in its systems were being observed, though full restoration had not yet been achieved.
The outage, which began on Thursday afternoon (November 12), primarily affected Outlook and Exchange Online, while disruptions were also reported in Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 applications.
According to Microsoft’s latest update, service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels, and system performance continues to fluctuate.
User traffic is being restored gradually to prevent the servers from becoming overloaded again.
What will happen to undelivered
emails? One of the most significant issues concerns emails that have been sent but have not reached their recipients. For this reason, Microsoft announced that it is extending the retry window for delayed emails to 48 hours to minimize the risk of message loss during the recovery process.
This means that emails sent during the outage—even those from other providers, such as Gmail—may be delivered with a delay once system operations are restored.
The company assures users that it is treating the incident as a top priority, though it has not announced a specific time for full restoration.
How Many Users Were
Affected The actual extent of the outage remains unknown, as reports of issues do not necessarily correspond to the total number of users affected. According to the BBC, the Downdetector platform recorded approximately 43,000 reports of Outlook issues at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, Greek time. In the United States, reports had exceeded 130,000 at the peak of the outage.
However, it should be noted that these figures are only an indication of the scale of the problem, as they reflect only those users who choose to report the malfunction.
Given that approximately 430 million people use Office 365 services, the actual number of those who experienced problems may be much higher.
Microsoft has not officially released figures on the total number of affected users.
Problems at banks, airlines, and public services
The global outage has caused significant operational disruptions for businesses, banks, airlines, and public services.
According to Reuters, in India, the airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air faced difficulties serving customers via email, while in Taiwan, securities and insurance companies were affected, with one firm even being forced to cancel a scheduled bond buyback transaction.
In Japan, problems were reported with the Ministry of Finance’s electronic communications, while in Australia and Singapore, financial institution executives were forced to resort to phones and faxes to execute and confirm transactions.
Disruptions were also reported in artificial intelligence services, with OpenAI and Anthropic experiencing issues connecting their applications to Microsoft’s services.
As mentioned above, problems were also reported in the banking sector, with financial institutions resorting to phone calls and alternative means of communication to serve customers and confirm transactions.
Timeline of the Outage
The outage began on Thursday afternoon (November 12), when users started experiencing problems accessing Exchange Online and Outlook. As the hours passed, the disruptions spread, with Microsoft discovering that a large number of servers had unexpectedly gone offline.
The company’s technicians attempted to resolve the issue by rerouting user traffic and restarting the affected servers. However, these efforts did not yield immediate results, as some systems began malfunctioning again as soon as the number of connections increased.
Work continued throughout the night, with the first signs of improvement appearing on Friday morning. Microsoft proceeded with a gradual restoration of services to prevent further overload.
What Caused the Outage and What Microsoft
Is Investigating The investigation is focusing on the cascading strain on the company’s infrastructure. According to the company’s official updates, when a large number of servers went offline, traffic was redirected to the remaining servers, which were unable to handle the increased load. As a result, the initial problem spread, causing a series of disruptions to services used worldwide.
At the same time, the company is investigating whether recent changes to the technical configurations of its systems contributed to the outage. At this time, it remains unclear what caused the initial server outage, and there is no evidence linking the incident to a cyberattack.
Microsoft has committed to publishing a detailed technical report once the problem has been definitively resolved, though it has not yet announced a specific timeline for the full restoration of its services.
Source: Protothema.gr
