Newshot Microsoft 365 Outage Lasts Over 10 Hours, Forcing Japan’s Government to Use Phones to Keep Work Going
IT之家, November 13: In the early hours of today, Microsoft 365 core services including Outlook and Teams experienced a massive global disruption.
Data from monitoring site Downdetector showed that problem reports for Outlook once approached 130,000, and the failure lasted several hours, affecting government agencies and enterprise users in multiple countries and regions.
The Japanese government was one of the affected public sectors. According to a CCTV News report today, Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary 尾崎正直 confirmed at a press conference that the government common information infrastructure “GSS” operated by the Digital Agency (IT之家 note: Government Solution Service, which provides standardized office computers and network environments for Japan’s ministries and agencies) experienced a malfunction; email software such as Outlook used by various departments stopped running, and some operations were affected. A government-related source told the media, “Kasumigaseki (where Japan’s central ministries and agencies are concentrated) is quite chaotic.”
Japan’s Digital Minister 古川俊治 said that as an emergency response, multiple contact means such as telephones, chat tools, and SMS have been secured, and “operations are currently being maintained through the above methods to avoid obstacles to government business.” 尾崎正直 also said that he had learned Microsoft is proceeding with recovery work, and the government will closely monitor its response progress.
Microsoft’s explanation of the cause points to a cascading infrastructure failure. Microsoft initially reported “high load on infrastructure in multiple regions,” but subsequent investigation ruled out the possibility of a traffic surge and confirmed that a considerable number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable, causing the remaining servers to bear additional pressure.
These servers failed automatic health checks and were therefore judged 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 scheme to speed up recovery.
Although Microsoft’s relevant teams have tried their utmost to fix it, as of now Microsoft 365 service availability has still not recovered noticeably, and Microsoft has not announced a clear full-recovery time.
Microsoft’s latest update shows: facing the persistent problem of traffic allocation imbalance, the company is looking for other feasible ways to improve service capacity.
The outage also affected connectivity components relied on by OpenAI and Anthropic AI services. Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs said the Australian government has activated relevant protocols to ensure priority handling when Microsoft services recover.
- “Microsoft 365 core services suffer massive global paralysis: Outlook, OneDrive, Teams all affected, gradually restarting and recovering”
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