November 13, 2026
A widespread technical outage in Microsoft 365 services, on Thursday and Friday, November 12 and 13, caused complete paralysis in the work of millions of employees around the world, as email inboxes were closed, meetings stopped, and artificial intelligence tools were unable to access files, extending from the United States to the Asia-Pacific region. This outage re-highlighted the extent of the global economy’s excessive dependence on a limited number of cloud service providers.
According to Reuters and data from the Downdetector malfunction monitoring platform, the impact affected 74 countries and territories, recording more than 130,000 reports of malfunctions in the Outlook service within the United States alone during rush hour.
In statements to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Ashwin Pal, a partner in the risk consulting department at RSM Australia, estimated the cost to Australian companies alone at “billions of dollars,” explaining that professional services companies such as law and accounting firms are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, and that the financial repercussions will continue for several years as a result of the backlog of work. In the same context, a small business owner in Queensland confirmed that losing one day of work cost her at least 30,000 Australian dollars. For comparison, Insurance Business magazine referred to estimates by Parametrics, which estimated the cost of the Crowd Strike failure in July 2024 at approximately $5.4 billion for Fortune 500 companies alone.
In terms of financial markets, the American company “Workhorse Group”, listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, was forced to postpone the announcement of its financial results for the third quarter from November 12 to 16. Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, said that investors may temporarily overcome the impact of this outage, but repeating such outages would harm Microsoft’s reputation in the long term.
In the aviation sector, the companies “IndiGo” and “Akasa Air” in India announced that their customer support services had been affected via email, while the companies “IndiGo” and “Air India” issued urgent alerts to their customers, according to the “India Today” website.
The malfunction was not limited to traditional services, but also extended to the artificial intelligence tools associated with the Microsoft system. The companies “OpenAI” and “Anthropic” announced that they faced technical problems in the tools for linking with the services of the American giant.
