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Microsoft is battling a global outage affecting Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services, with disruption stretching from the US working day on Thursday, 12 November, into Friday’s business hours across Asia Pacific.
The incident has interrupted email access and Exchange Online-dependent features in services including Microsoft Teams and Copilot, while also disrupting Microsoft 365 integrations offered by OpenAI and Anthropic.
On Friday, there had been valiant efforts to resume email communications and work productivity. For example, a few alternative personal email addresses with Gmail domains were sighted.
Connectors – the knock-on effects
OpenAI’s official incident page lists degraded performance affecting ChatGPT’s connectors/apps.
Anthropic also explained that its users could not open the Outlook add-in and that “this issue is caused by a Microsoft 365 service incident, and mail, calendar and search tools in the Microsoft 365 connector are still failing for most requests. Claude for Outlook remains affected.”
Security risks
The disruption also raises security risks as employees seek alternative ways to work.
Ben Mudie, field CTO for Asia Pacific at Tenable, warned that using personal email accounts or unapproved file-sharing services could move sensitive business information beyond an organisation’s visibility and control.
“When essential tools become unavailable, employees naturally look for ways to keep working. The security risk is that temporary workarounds, such as personal email accounts or unapproved file-sharing services, can move sensitive business information beyond an organisation’s visibility and control.
“Disruption can also create opportunities for impersonation. An urgent request arriving through an unfamiliar channel, or a message offering to restore access, deserves extra scrutiny.”
Beyond Tenable, ESET, and Sophos had warned that attackers could exploit the disruption through fake support.
On Sophos’ X account, Aiden Sinnott, Threat Researcher stated, “Bad actors will be looking to take advantage of concerned individuals, offering a resolution or assurances… people should exercise caution when receiving emails, texts, or calls purporting to be from Microsoft or other affected businesses, particularly banks or shops.”
Binalyze’s VP of market strategy, Marie Wilcox, also highlighted a less obvious risk: security teams may miss malicious activity while their monitoring and alerting workflows are disrupted.
Update on 14 November 2026
Come Saturday, latest reported outage updates include “sustained service recovery” with cause for the outage identified as an earlier network capacity upgrade. This had caused what Microsoft earlier reported as “suddenly unavailable servers” leading to unexpected load and then failure.
This outage is reported to have affected over 70 countries.
