London, 13 November 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Anthony Gill
Microsoft is racing to restore Outlook, Teams and Copilot after a global outage that began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday and was still unresolved on Friday morning. Users in more than 70 countries reported problems. By Friday, Downdetector had logged at least 43,000 Outlook reports, according to Al Jazeera. Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyberattack. Its engineers have found that “a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed”, causing those servers to stop responding, Bloomberg reported via Swissinfo.
In Europe, the damage was practical as well as inconvenient. Euronext warned its email communications were unavailable. Richemont, the Swiss luxury group, postponed its earnings release. Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London lost email, although procedures went ahead as planned. Several UK police forces could not take crime reports online. The Financial Times described a company racing to recover. More than a day in, it still had not managed it.
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SubscribeWhy This One Is Different
Microsoft outages are not new. What is unusual is how long this one has lasted. Previous disruptions rarely ran beyond a few hours, and this one has gone past 18. Microsoft is posting near-hourly updates, rerouting traffic away from affected servers and rolling back a network change, but it has given no timeline for full recovery.
Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft had compared the situation to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident: an update that “has gone awry”. Whether or not that comparison holds, the pattern is familiar. A single change inside one supplier has knocked over government departments, hospitals, stock exchange operators and listed companies on several continents at once.
The European Problem
For European business, this is the latest reminder of an uncomfortable fact: the continent’s daily operations run on American infrastructure. Email, calendars, document storage, meetings and increasingly AI copilots all sit with a handful of US providers. Europe has started to address this in payments, as the push to break from Visa and Mastercard shows. It has barely started in workplace software.
Brussels has spent years talking about digital sovereignty, and the money is beginning to move, with European tech investment and Europe’s answer to Palantir showing the ambition. But no European alternative has the scale to replace Microsoft 365 for a bank, a ministry or a hospital trust. Until one does, every outage in Redmond becomes an outage in Paris, Frankfurt and London.
The financial hit to Microsoft itself is likely to be small. Analysts expect at most a brief dip in the shares, and investors have shrugged off past outages, much as they did after the sell-off in Google shares. The real cost falls on customers: a missed earnings release, a cancelled trade notice, a police force that can’t take reports.
The Bottom Line
Boards should stop treating cloud outages as IT problems and start treating them as concentration risk, the same way banks treat counterparty exposure. That means backup communication channels, tested continuity plans and serious questions about putting every critical workflow with one vendor. Microsoft will fix this. The next outage, from Microsoft or someone else, is a matter of when. European companies that still have a single point of failure after this week will have only themselves to blame.
