A major outage hit US technology company Microsoft’s email service Outlook, leaving tens of thousands of users worldwide unable to send or receive emails as usual. Singapore was also affected, including several government ministries and agencies.
Outlook is widely used across Singapore’s public service. Several civil servants told Lianhe Zaobao that they were unable to send or receive emails through Outlook on Friday (13 November) morning.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency notified government ministries and agencies on Friday morning that a global Microsoft service outage had affected Outlook. An initial assessment indicated that users might experience unstable connections or slow service.
In a further notification at 8.26am, the Government Technology Agency said it was still investigating the outage. SG-Teams, the communications software used by government ministries, cloud storage service OneDrive and file-sharing platform SharePoint Online were unaffected, but the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot was experiencing intermittent service.
The agency is closely monitoring the situation and working to restore services fully. It will promptly update ministries and agencies as more information becomes available.
Lianhe Zaobao has contacted Singapore’s Public Service Division and Government Technology Agency for more information.
Some higher education institutions in Singapore, including Nanyang Technological University and the Singapore University of Social Sciences, also use Outlook and had their email services disrupted.
The major outage began at about 1pm US Eastern Time on Thursday (12 November), or 2am on Friday in Singapore. Data from outage-tracking website Downdetector showed nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems worldwide in the early stages of the outage, while several thousand users also reported being unable to use Microsoft Teams normally.
