Email and calendar failures leave HR teams to keep staff informed, scheduled and paid across dozens of countries
A Microsoft outage that began Thursday stretched into a second day Friday, leaving employers in dozens of countries with unreliable email, calendars and some Teams features. Microsoft said server problems, not a cyberattack, caused the disruption, and by Friday morning it was reporting "encouraging recovery progress."
Meanwhile, HR teams have to reach employees without the channel they usually depend on.
What happened in the Microsoft outage
Microsoft said the failure centered on Exchange Online, the cloud email and scheduling service behind its Microsoft 365 workplace suite, and on features that depend on it, including its Copilot AI assistant. The company said a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, shifting load onto the rest of its infrastructure.
By about 8 a.m. Eastern time Friday, Microsoft described broader improvements in North America, sustained gains across much of Europe and early signs of recovery in Asia Pacific, though some users still faced intermittent problems or delayed email. Outage monitors recorded disruption in at least 74 countries, according to CBC News.
How employers felt the outage
Reuters reported that European exchange operator Euronext had email disruptions, British insurer Aviva activated backups for its earnings calls and Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers of delayed updates. In the U.S., electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its results announcement to Nov. 16.
"What we do know so far is that this is first and foremost a communication risk," Walter Pasquarelli, a strategy adviser to governments on AI and an affiliated researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Al Jazeera.
Finance work felt it quickly. James Kettel, who owns a property investment brokerage in Hong Kong, told NBC News he couldn't get a verification code for bank transfers, and that payroll, customer transactions and other financial transactions at his business need email confirmation.
How HR can keep people connected
Microsoft's service health page said core Teams functions, including calls, meetings and channel messages, weren't affected, though calendar scheduling and other features that depend on Exchange Online were, NBC News reported. That means HR can't count on a Teams invitation or an email reply having arrived.
A backup channel comes first. Text messages, phone trees or a non-Microsoft messaging tool can carry the basics, such as who needs to work, where and when.
Payroll approvals, shift schedules and benefits deadlines that run through email need a manual fallback or a new date. Interviews and onboarding sessions booked through calendar invitations may not have reached candidates and new hires, so contact them directly. HRD America laid out more practical steps for HR teams during the Microsoft outage in its earlier coverage.
Expect a backlog, too. Microsoft set a 48-hour email timeout window in Asia Pacific to protect delayed messages, Al Jazeera reported, so some messages could arrive late and in bunches. Employees shouldn't be penalized for deadlines missed through no fault of their own.
What the outage means for continuity planning
The outage has revived questions about reliance on a handful of technology providers.
"The bigger worry is that this is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro. "If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem," he said, "it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands."
Ciaran Martin, former head of the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre and now a professor at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, told NBC News the incident "looks like being one of the biggest outages of all time," though he said it was too early to be sure.
Those concerns echo the ones raised after the July 2024 global IT outage, when HRD America reported that an academic urged employers to overhaul their cybersecurity strategies. The same questions now face the senior leaders profiled in HRD America's Global 100 report on the top HR executives and leaders in the world, who are already navigating a range of challenges.
Microsoft has said only that its post-incident report will follow once recovery is complete.
