Oleksandr Kuzmenko Around IT 13 November 2026, 12:28

Millions of IT workers on a break. How Microsoft's global outage disrupted the work of IT companies in Ukraine and 73 other countries

A global outage of key Microsoft services has been ongoing for more than 12 hours, causing millions of users in 74 countries to lose access to Outlook and Teams messenger. The problem has affected government agencies, banks, and large businesses, including Ukrainian offices of global technology companies.

The outages began on Thursday and quickly spread to dozens of countries and territories in about an hour, according to Downdetector. More than 430 million people currently use Microsoft 365 apps, and more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies have integrated Copilot into their processes, so the outage effectively paralyzed office work around the world.

How the outage affected Ukrainian IT

In the Kyiv coworking space where dev.ua journalists work, there is an unusual silence - employees of a large American company have gone en masse for a smoke break. "I heard that Outlook is not working? Everything is hanging. Since yesterday," said one of the employees.

In Ukraine, many large technology companies use the Microsoft 365 infrastructure and Outlook email client. In particular, EPAM confirms the problems: according to employees, Outlook email is not working, but the Teams messenger continues to function stably.

A similar situation has slowed down work in the telecom sector. At one large Ukrainian internet provider, the local IT department sent out a warning to employees this morning about unstable operation of Microsoft services.

"The Outlook mobile app still won't load for me. In general, the Outlook service sometimes breaks through, and sometimes disappears again. And it's been like that since last night," said the provider's employee.

Other market players are also experiencing difficulties. Journalists from dev.ua asked an employee of a large Ukrainian cloud provider to send a test email. She sent it, but the message never reached the recipient. According to the specialist, there have been no incoming emails since the morning, and the weekend emails simply disappear without a trace.

"And a few more emails that I sent today simply disappeared. They're not in drafts, outbox, or sent," the employee of the cloud provider noted.

What's happening in the world?

The global impact of the incident was felt across critical infrastructure and the financial sector in different time zones. In the US, city governments across the country reported widespread email outages and urged citizens to resolve issues by phone, and at least one US corporation was forced to postpone its quarterly earnings conference call.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the outage caused delays in court proceedings in the Philippines and Australia, while some Japanese government departments temporarily reverted to paper-based workflows. In Hong Kong, employees at investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs complained of disruptions that lasted until lunchtime. A number of international airlines also reported support issues.

At the same time, financial institutions have begun warning customers about the increased threat of cyber fraud. Banks are urging people to be especially vigilant against phishing attacks, as attackers often use massive technical failures to send out malicious emails disguised as official notifications.

What Microsoft says

The tech giant posted an update on its service status page on Friday morning, saying that engineers had made only “minor progress” in restoring stable operation. The company explained that specialists were testing server performance and the work of applied fixes after the infrastructure was rebooted.

About half an hour later, Microsoft issued another message, noting "positive results in terms of service stability and increased throughput" due to recent traffic optimization measures. However, the company has not yet announced an exact timeframe for full service restoration.

Microsoft representatives also emphasized that they have no evidence that the outage was caused by a hacker attack or cybersecurity breach. They promise to publish a full report on the root causes of the incident and protection measures once the problem is finally fixed.

This is not the first time Microsoft has experienced a major outage in its cloud infrastructure. For example, in July 2024 , an incorrect update to CrowdStrike software caused a global “blue screen of death” on millions of Windows devices, which brought airlines, banks, hospitals, and media around the world to a standstill for several days.

Recall that in late October 2026, Microsoft announced a voluntary redundancy program with compensation payments, which will affect about 60,000 employees . The company took this step to balance large-scale investments in the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure with maintaining financial stability and capital efficiency.