Improvements noted, no cyberattack according to Microsoft… What we know about the global outage affecting the American giant since Thursday

“Technical unemployment” for many employees. Tens of thousands of users cannot access their emails on Friday, November 13, due to an outage in Microsoft's Outlook email. The company claims, on Friday morning, to have noted “improvements” with a view to resolving the situation. Franceinfo takes stock of this major incident, which began Thursday evening and concerns 74 countries.

More than 70 countries affected

According to the outage tracking site Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook on Thursday shortly after 6 p.m. GMT (7 p.m. Paris). The disruption spread globally within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, according to the same source. A map published by Downdetector on X shows the outage affecting users across the Americas, as well as parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Among the affected countries is New Zealand, which issued an advisory stating that its "ability to receive emails has been impacted by the global Microsoft outage. This also impacts all New Zealand embassies, consulates and representations around the world." The Minister of the Economy of Japan, Ryosei Akazawa, anticipated, in an interview with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, that this outage would have "a significant impact" due to the high number of people using the affected Microsoft software.

Outlook, Teams or Copilot applications affected by the outages

Microsoft reported on Thursday evening on X that the problem appeared to affect "connectivity to the Microsoft 365 service for users, regardless of their region." Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service, which includes popular apps like Outlook and Teams.

The outage also disrupts certain functions of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants which connect to Microsoft accounts to read emails or consult the calendar. In addition to Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, Claude and ChatGPT were also affected: Anthropic and OpenAI, which develop them, reported that their AI assistants were no longer able to access Microsoft 365 services.

“No signs” of malicious action or cyberattack, according to the group

The disruption is linked to a "high load" on the infrastructure, Microsoft reported on “At this stage, I can confirm that there are no signs of malicious action or cyberattack,” Charles Lamanna, one of the company's executive vice-presidents, said on the social network.

“Improvements” in the situation, according to the firm