MICROSOFT'S failure to restore services consistently after more than 12 hours of disruption has prolonged a global outage affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications, with the impact extending into Asia-Pacific business hours on Friday.
The disruption has prompted Malaysia's National Cyber Security Agency (NACSA) to advise government agencies and operators of National Critical Information Infrastructure (NCII) to check their affected systems and maintain cybersecurity monitoring.
NACSA said the incident was more likely caused by technical or infrastructure problems than a cyberattack, based on information available so far.
“Based on current information, the disruption is more likely caused by technical or infrastructure issues and not a cyberattack,” it said in a Facebook post today.
The agency said the disruption involved Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR.
The National Cyber Coordination and Command Centre (NC4), under NACSA, also urged affected organisations to follow Microsoft's latest service updates and promptly report operational disruptions through existing channels.
Microsoft said it had applied adjustments to affected servers, resulting in partial recovery in some regions, but the measures had failed to deliver sustained restoration.
“We're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” the company said in an update on X.
In a service health notice, Microsoft said features dependent on Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and messaging platform, were affected, while other Microsoft 365 services that did not rely on it remained functional.
The company added that it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the outage.
The disruption affected users across the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, after thousands of users in the United States reported problems.
At its peak, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US on Thursday, while more than 18,000 reports were registered at 11.30pm Eastern Time.
Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the US were among those affected, alongside businesses including OpenAI and Anthropic, which reported problems with their Microsoft connectors.
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed the incident was not a cyberattack, drawing comparisons with the CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024.
Australia's spy agency and federal police were among organisations affected, while Japan's government also reported disruption to its information system infrastructure.
The latest incident has renewed concerns over the reliability of Microsoft's cloud-based services, following previous disruptions involving Microsoft 365 and its Azure platform. - November 13, 2026
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