What we know about the global Microsoft outage
Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.
Noticia publicada originalmente por BBC News — World en bbc.co.uk (se abre en una pestaña nueva). Minuto 24 no es autor de este contenido.
Claves de la noticia
- Una caída global de Microsoft 365 ha provocado problemas, e incluso la interrupción total de algunos servicios, como el correo electrónico y los productos de inteligencia artificial.
- Microsoft descarta que la caída se deba a un ciberataque y la atribuye a una carga elevada en su infraestructura, tras quedar fuera de servicio un gran número de servidores.
- Teams, Outlook y Copilot se han visto afectados por problemas de conectividad, aunque algunos usuarios siguen pudiendo usar Teams para mensajes y reuniones.
- La compañía dijo el viernes por la mañana que observaba señales tempranas de estabilización, pero que la capacidad aún no había vuelto a niveles normales.
- Downdetector registró 140.000 reportes de problemas con Outlook desde 74 países, aunque la cifra real probablemente sea mayor, ya que depende de informes voluntarios.
Contexto
Microsoft 365 es un conjunto de aplicaciones de productividad utilizado por empresas, organismos públicos y particulares en todo el mundo, por lo que una interrupción de este tipo tiene un efecto amplio. Cuando fallan el correo y las herramientas de colaboración, se complican tareas cotidianas como trabajar, coordinar citas o acceder a cuentas. El artículo señala que el impacto alcanza también a otras compañías tecnológicas, a administraciones públicas y a servicios como centros de salud, farmacias, policía y colegios en el Reino Unido. Expertos citados por la BBC consideran que el episodio podría ser uno de los más disruptivos para el correo empresarial, lo que subraya la dependencia actual de estas plataformas.
Resumen elaborado por Minuto 24 con ayuda de inteligencia artificial a partir de la noticia publicada por BBC News — World. Puede contener imprecisiones: ante cualquier duda, consulta la fuente original.
Published13 November 2026, 07:12 GMT
A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems, or in some cases disabled entire services, including emails and artificial intelligence products.
Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.
Here's what we know about the services affected and what went wrong.
Follow live updates: Microsoft scrambles to solve global outage affecting tens of thousands but says fixes not going 'as expected'
What happened?
Microsoft 365 Services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot, have been affected by "connectivity problems".
Customers are reporting varying levels of access - many have not been able to send or receive emails, view certain files or details on their calendar apps.
Some users have been able to use Teams and are using messaging and online meeting functions without issues.
How many people have been affected?
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft's website.
The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed, but monitoring website Downdetector had 140,000 people from 74 countries report issues with Outlook on Thursday evening.
The real figure affected is likely much higher because Downdetector relies primarily on users self-reporting.
Microsoft 365 is also used by companies worldwide and is expected to have a knock-on effect to other services.
Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have both reported problems as a result of the outage.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft's services, which has caused some tools to not work as expected.
Government agencies and services, including the Singaporean government and Australia's spy agency, have also said they have been affected.
Across the UK, GP surgeries, pharmacies, police and schools have been affected by the outage.
Some GP surgeries have urged patients not to submit messages via their website while the problem remains, while several large police forces are urging members of the public to call if they want to make a report.
What has Microsoft said?
Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-attack and attributed the ongoing outage to "elevated load" on its infrastructure.
The term refers to when servers are handling a much higher volume of stress than they usually do.
In the case of the Microsoft outage, a large number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable", the company said, which sent added traffic to remaining servers, straining these.
On Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation", but service capacity has "not yet returned to normal levels".
In an earlier statement, the tech giant had said that its attempted fixes were "not taking as expected".
What have experts said?
Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt told the BBC the outage could have far-reaching consequences.
"Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and reminds us how critical email still is.
"Not only does this outage affect many people's ability to work but also things like the ability to communicate about appointments, purchase things that need verification, create or access accounts and services," he said.
Gergely Orosz, a former leading software engineer at several major tech companies including Skype and Uber, said this could be the "most disruptive" business email outage "of all time".
He said it was still difficult to know just how many people have been affected by the disruption, but added he "cannot recall" an outage over business email ever taking this long to return to normal.
Paul Spain from New Zealand-based advisory firm Gorilla Technology said that with e-mails and services offline, companies have practically "lost a business day", which is "frustrating" users".
Get in touch
Have you or your business been affected by the outage?
