Status as of Saturday, 14 November 2026, about 5.30pm Singapore time.

If your work emails went quiet from Friday morning, you were not alone. A large Microsoft outage hit users in dozens of countries, and Singapore was among them. Here is a plain-English guide to what happened and what to do next time your email or chat tools stop working.

What happened?

Problems began at about 4pm GMT on Thursday, 12 November (around midnight Singapore time on Friday), when users could not access Outlook. According to Al Jazeera, Microsoft said it had only "marginal success" in restoring its most widely used workplace services more than 12 hours later, with Outlook hit hardest and Teams and Copilot also disrupted for users in 74 countries.

What was the impact in Singapore?

  • The Government Technology Agency (GovTech) said government emails were down and it was working with Microsoft to resolve the issue, as reported by AP and AsiaOne.
  • The Ministry of Finance posted an advisory that replies to emails sent to the ministry might be delayed because of the disruption.
  • Social media posts say the Singapore Courts also reported email disruptions and possible delays to court applications and enquiries. We could not confirm this on an official page.
  • On 14 November, GovTech said Microsoft Outlook services for the Government had been fully restored, according to a Yahoo News Singapore report.

Is it fixed now?

Microsoft reported continued recovery progress, including "encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific", but warned that some users may still see intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery. It said it had no indication the outage was caused by malicious activity. Recovery may vary by company, so check with your own IT team.

Your outage survival checklist

  1. Do not panic-resend. Duplicate emails can clog queues once service returns. Wait, then check your Sent folder before resending.
  2. Use a backup channel. For anything urgent, phone, SMS or a messaging app your organisation already uses.
  3. Check what is still available offline. The Outlook desktop app may still show emails already downloaded, and Teams chats and calls largely kept working during this outage, according to Al Jazeera.
  4. Plan for delays. If you wrote to a government agency, bank or school, allow extra time before following up, and ring them for deadlines.
  5. Keep important files in more than one place, for example a local copy or another cloud drive.
  6. Be careful with unexpected messages claiming to fix the outage. Do not click links asking for your password. See
    for simple phone-safety habits.
  7. If you run a business, write down a short "email is down" plan: who to call, and which tools to use instead.

For essential services

GovTech was reported to have told CNA that emergency services and Singpass were not affected. We could not read the original CNA page, so please treat this as reported rather than confirmed.

What we still do not know

Microsoft has not published a full cause. Australia's Home Affairs Minister said Microsoft likened it to an update that went wrong, but Microsoft has said it is reviewing what happened.