Microsoft 365 outage: Outlook stopped since Thursday evening, Bitcoin is still running

Friday the 13th, empty inbox. The Microsoft 365 outage brought Outlook, Teams and Copilot down on Thursday evening for millions of users and Microsoft had still not restored Exchange Online this Friday at dawn. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin network continued to produce a block approximately every ten minutes without publishing any press release.

“The fundamental problem with conventional money is all the trust needed to make it work,” wrote Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Replace “currency” with “messaging” and you have the summary of the night. Coinbase had already spent hours down in May due to an Amazon Web Services outage. Microsoft takes over with its own servers.

The key points of this article:

Microsoft's professional messaging has been disrupted in 74 countries since Thursday.

The publisher rules out the possibility of an attack and accuses servers of serial failure.

Security codes sent to an Outlook or Hotmail address may arrive late.

The Bitcoin blockchain functions normally, which is not the case for centralized access.

Microsoft 365 outage and twelve hours of servers on their knees

Teams failed first, Thursday November 12 around 3:45 p.m. Paris time. Exchange Online followed at 6:54 p.m., first in the Americas, then everywhere.

As of 7 p.m., Downdetector counted nearly 130,000 reports for Outlook in 74 countries and territories.

Microsoft first spoke of a high load on part of its infrastructure. The diagnosis changed overnight. Servers became unavailable without warning and the rest of the fleet absorbed their traffic before giving in in turn, trapped by a completely overwhelmed process of establishing secure connections.

The restarted machines fell back after the first requests.

At 2:12 a.m., the publisher began rolling back a network configuration change that coincides with the start of the incident. Microsoft assures that it does not know of “any malicious activity” causing the outage.

Outlook crash and crypto accounts blocked at the door

The concrete risk for you is contained in a six-digit code. Most exchanges send login, withdrawal or new device confirmations by email.

If your Binance, Coinbase or Kraken account is attached to an Outlook or Hotmail address, these messages can arrive hours late. If ever, as long as the shed remains disrupted.

Microsoft is reporting email delivery delays on Exchange Online, and Outlook.com is listed among the affected consumer services on its status page. There is no point in strafing the “resend code” button: you risk waking up your platform’s anti-fraud safeguards.

Bad night also for the robots. Microsoft 365 connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic are affected and Copilot no longer accesses its users' emails or calendars. The in-house bot that summarizes your inbox every morning will also be waiting.

Bitcoin spins while Microsoft's cloud falters

The contrast is enough to make you smile. The Bitcoin network has not experienced any interruption since 2013 and does not depend on any particular data center, since thousands of nodes spread across the planet validate the same blocks.

No one can restart Bitcoin for lack of a switch.

But the crypto ecosystem is not immune. Cloudflare shut down Coinbase and Kraken on December 5, 2025, two weeks after an initial global outage. Your bitcoins don't move a satoshi, but the gateway to them often belongs to Amazon, Cloudflare or Microsoft.

And the bill adds up quickly. Ashwin Pal, partner at RSM Australia, estimates on ABC that each hour of downtime costs professional services firms more than $100,000. With nearly 4 million businesses dependent on Microsoft software, he estimates total losses in the billions.