Microsoft 365 outage: scammers strike as global email fails

Microsoft's email and productivity suite went dark across much of the world on Thursday evening, and Dutch users were still hitting errors on Friday morning. By 8.15am, the Dutch outage tracker allestoringen.nl had logged almost 2,800 complaints about Outlook, nearly 700 about Microsoft 365 and just over 200 about Teams. By around 1pm, many users in the Netherlands could reach their inboxes again.

The disruption reached far beyond private inboxes. Municipalities including Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft and Leeuwarden reported problems with digital services, and Twenterand warned residents that emails might be delayed or never delivered. Provincial governments in Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Groningen, Overijssel and Noord-Brabant also reported issues, according to NL Times. The Dutch court system had trouble sending and receiving email, though courts remained reachable by phone.

Universities were hit too. The University of Twente and Radboud University warned students about disruptions, and Radboud had to make alternative arrangements for its Bachelor's Open Day on Friday, telling prospective students to use a WhatsApp contact number because confirmation emails might not arrive. SURF, which coordinates shared digital infrastructure for Dutch universities and universities of applied sciences, reported difficulties of its own.

How bad is this compared with other outages

Microsoft 365 alone has around 430 million users worldwide, and the tools involved — Outlook, Teams, the Office suite — sit at the centre of the working day for governments, courts, schools and companies. A tech analyst told the BBC the incident could be the "most severe technology outage in history" and warned it could cost billions of dollars. Regional broadcasters Omroep Flevoland, RTV Utrecht and Omroep Brabant reported email problems, and the University of Twente warned of disruption on its systems.

"We're seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure." — Microsoft, in a service update

Scammers move in

The Dutch pharmacists' organisation KNMP warned that phishing emails were circulating, apparently from hackers trying to exploit the outage. The messages pose as Microsoft offers to restore or update software. KNMP urged people not to trust them: Microsoft does not send such emails and communicates about outages through its own channels. The warning matters because outages train people to expect unusual messages from IT providers, which is exactly the opening a phishing campaign needs.

What Microsoft says

Microsoft attributed the failure to "increased load" on its infrastructure, with a number of servers unexpectedly offline, and said it had found no evidence of malicious activity causing the incident. The company has not given a timeline for full recovery, saying it is expanding a fix to servers supporting regions entering peak business hours.

What happens next

The practical fallout will last longer than the outage itself. Email sent during the blackout may bounce or arrive late, calendar invites may not have synced, and organisations that route bookings through Microsoft forms will spend Friday catching up.

• Recovery: Microsoft is rolling out a configuration patch region by region, with no full-recovery timeline published.
• Phishing: KNMP and security teams are urging users to delete unsolicited "Microsoft" emails rather than click them.
• Backlogs: municipalities, courts and universities are working through delayed messages and missed confirmations.
• Accountability: expect renewed scrutiny of how much critical public infrastructure depends on a single cloud provider.

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Sources: DutchNews.nl, "Warnings as hackers begin exploiting Microsoft outage" (13 November 2026); NL Times, "Dutch municipalities, courts and universities hit by global Microsoft 365 outage" (13 November 2026).