Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Krungthai Bank email services
Businesses and government agencies faced hours of disruption as Microsoft worked on server problems, while affected bank customers were advised to call.
- A global Microsoft 365 outage, lasting over 10 hours, caused major disruptions to services including Outlook and Teams, affecting businesses and government agencies worldwide.
- Krungthai Bank confirmed its email system was directly impacted by the Microsoft outage, prompting the bank to direct customers to use phone support for urgent matters.
- The disruption was attributed to multiple servers unexpectedly failing, not a cyberattack, with over 130,000 user reports for Outlook in the US at its peak.
Microsoft was still working to restore Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services after about 10 hours of disruption on Thursday (November 12, 2026), affecting businesses and government agencies worldwide.
Krungthai Bank also reported disruption to its email system.
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States (US) at the peak around 1pm Eastern Time (ET).
The tally stood at more than 25,000 at 9.30pm ET, or 2.30am Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The monitoring website, which compiles reports from several sources, also showed disruption to Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, early on Friday (November 13, 2026), local time.
Krungthai Bank directs customers to phone support
Krungthai Bank attributed temporary problems with sending and receiving emails to the global Microsoft 365 outage.
It apologised for the inconvenience and said it was closely monitoring efforts to resolve the problem.
Customers with urgent enquiries or awaiting an email response were advised to telephone their relationship manager (RM) directly or contact the Krungthai Contact Center on 02-111-1111, available 24 hours a day.
Server problems and recovery efforts
A Microsoft spokesperson said most affected users had problems with Exchange Online, the company’s cloud-based platform for email, calendars, contacts and tasks.
Microsoft said features relying on Exchange Online and email were affected, while functions independent of Exchange Online remained operational.
Microsoft said multiple servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, shifting their workload to the remaining infrastructure.
It said the heavier load was not caused by an overall increase in traffic.
Some servers had failed automated health checks, and the company was preparing an automated recovery system to identify and restart unresponsive servers.
Microsoft issued progress updates through its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
Some servers had been restored and remained stable so far, while the company was rerouting traffic where possible and streamlining efforts to bring the rest back online.
It reported limited recovery at 6pm ET, or 11pm GMT, as users gradually reconnected.
In its latest update, however, Microsoft said recovery efforts were not progressing as expected.
“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” it said.
Government and business disruption
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed the disruption was not a cyberattack.
“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” he told a press conference.
Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were affected on Friday, while the US House of Representatives reported disruption for its users and said its engineers were working with Microsoft.
The 2024 CrowdStrike failure was among the largest internet disruptions, affecting systems in hospitals, banks and airports and highlighting the vulnerability of interconnected technology worldwide.
OpenAI said it was investigating problems with Microsoft connectors, including new connections that might not work and tools not performing as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified a problem with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Users also reported problems with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google through Downdetector.
Amazon said on X that its services were operating normally and attributed the problems to an incident elsewhere on the internet, unrelated to its systems.
It said this could cause inaccurate reporting and advised users to check its own service status dashboard.
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its third-quarter results announcement from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruption caused by the Microsoft outage.
Microsoft had also reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform in October, affecting its productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
Source: Reuters
