Microsoft’s Self-Inflicted Outage Follows Plan to Cut Quarter of Workforce - Newsweek

Microsoft is scrambling to recover from a massive global outage, just weeks after offering voluntary buyouts to more than a quarter of its workforce.

Starting Thursday afternoon, widespread disruptions crippled core Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Copilot, Exchange Online, and Teams.

More than 140,000 users across 74 countries reported issues on Downdetector, a website that monitors internet outages, as businesses worldwide were locked out of email and workplace tools.

Microsoft confirmed the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, instead pointing to failing automated server health checks and elevated processor usage.

"We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure," Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, told Newsweek in an emailed statement.

"We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward."

By Friday morning, engineers were still working to stabilize systems after initial fixes failed to take hold.

In an update on Friday, Microsoft said recovery progress was encouraging in Europe, "with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure."

The company said Japan remained comparatively more stable, while North America was also improving. However, Microsoft said that some users could still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continued.

"We're focused on addressing the remaining areas of disruption and improving service consistency across affected regions," Microsoft said. "Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up."

The company added: "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete."

The technical meltdown comes less than three weeks after the Redmond tech giant offered a "Voluntary Exit Offer" to roughly 60,000 eligible employees. That is approximately 27 percent of its 223,000-strong global workforce, across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and India.

Announced on October 26, the program makes eligible employees at the vice president level and below across selected divisions, including AI experiences, Copilot, finance, human resources, Xbox, and Windows + Devices, able to leave the company with packages similar to Microsoft's standard severance.

Microsoft has stressed that the offer does not mean 60,000 workers are being laid off, and it remains unclear how many eligible staff will choose to accept.

"The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we're evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter," Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote in an internal note to staff. "This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support."

The voluntary buyout program followed previous workforce reductions earlier this year. Microsoft announced 4,800 job cuts in July, equivalent to roughly 2.1 percent of its global workforce, and offered voluntary departures to around 9,000 U.S. employees.

At the time of the October buyout announcement, Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek that the scale of the offer stood out.

"Sixty thousand positions is a sizable chunk of Microsoft's overall global workforce, and the fear, obviously, is if this is in relation to a larger trend of how AI is leading to increased spending that must be funded through a reduced employee count," Beene said.

The outage caused widespread operational problems across multiple sectors from Thursday into Friday.

In the United States, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said it was experiencing disruptions to email and other communication platforms.

In Colorado, the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office said online bond payments for detainees had been affected; jail officials were not receiving the email notifications needed to process them, requiring payments to be made in person.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit also reported that its clerk's office had been unable to send or receive emails for much of Thursday. Electric vehicle manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter financial results announcement from November 12 to November 16 due to the disruption.

In the United Kingdom, several National Health Service (NHS) appointments, including cesarean sections, were canceled because the NHS calendar uses the Microsoft system, according to the BBC.

Several U.K. police forces warned that crimes reported online might not reach front-line officers, though the 999 emergency number continued operating normally.

Elsewhere, Immigration New Zealand paused the processing of all visa applications. Germany's national railway company Deutsche Bahn said it was unable to send out updated timetables for diverted services. Airlines in India and South Africa reported system and customer-support disruptions.

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.

Update 11/13/26, 10:10 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include a statement from Microsoft.