A major global outage in the cloud and office services of the leading American tech company 'Microsoft' has severely affected business activities and the pace of essential government work in many major countries of the world on Friday, November 13, 2026. The technical crisis, which extended from Washington to the Asia-Pacific region, disrupted international banking services in Hong Kong, caused serious problems to critical government systems in Australia and Japan, while significant delays were reported in courts in the Philippines. The widespread technical outage, which began Thursday night, has left millions of corporate and government users around the world unable to access Outlook email, Microsoft Teams and other essential Microsoft 365 applications. More than 12 hours after the American tech company first reported the problem officially, its engineers were still struggling to fully restore global services. Although Microsoft reported some progress in technical improvements, it also acknowledged that initial efforts to improve the service are not working as expected, although the company has denied finding any evidence of malicious activity or cyberattacks. Millions of emails stuck in Hong Kong banks, CrowdStrike-like effect on Australian intelligence agency, police and schools. The deepest impact of Microsoft's global outage was seen in Asia's major financial center Hong Kong, where employees of world-class big financial institutions like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs reported that they are not able to use email and Microsoft Teams, which is causing huge disruption in their daily financial work. Speaking to international news channel CNN, a banker said that some emails are coming, but millions of important messages are probably stuck in the backlog, which has had a direct impact on businesses communicating with foreign customers. On the other hand, this technical crisis in Australia has severely affected the functioning of schools, courts, intelligence agencies, police departments and other important government services, where employees were facing difficulty in opening Outlook and other Microsoft applications. Underlining the seriousness of this crisis, Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft itself has compared this incident to the historic 'CrowdStrike Outage' that occurred in July 2024. Burke said that he has spoken to the top Microsoft official in Australia and the government's national cyber security coordinator, after which it became clear that Microsoft does not consider this a cyber attack, but they suspect that this widespread problem may be related to a technical update. Physical copies of documents were resorted to in Japan, government systems were disrupted in Singapore and Philippines also. The heat of this global outage also reached the government IT infrastructure of Japan, which is considered a leader in the field of technology, due to which there was a lot of difficulty in sending emails to many major ministries and government agencies during working hours on Friday. Giving information about the situation, Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said that due to disruption in digital communication, government employees are now running their work by preparing physical copies (printed papers) of necessary documents. Similarly, Singapore's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) also officially confirmed that government email services have been down and they are working with the Microsoft team to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, while sharing a post on the social media platform Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air issued advisory, impact seen on American companies and AI platforms. In India too, the impact of this global outage has been seen on the customer service system of major airlines. The country's largest airline 'IndiGo' issued a statement saying that this technical disruption has affected their email support services, causing difficulty in receiving customer queries and complaints, however their other customer support channels continued to function normally and there was no impact on flight operations. At the same time, 'Akasa Air' also issued a special advisory for its passengers informing them about the delay in email support services. Additionally, local governments in several US cities reported widespread email problems and advised citizens to contact government offices directly by phone if needed, while industrial technology company Workhorse Group had to postpone its quarterly earnings conference call due to the outage. Not only this, leading artificial intelligence platforms 'OpenAI' and 'Anthropic' have also reported connectivity issues while connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, which makes it clear that this outage has had a widespread impact on modern technology platforms that depend on integration with other software.
