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How the Microsoft outage impacted courts and governments

What we're watching: A page providing updates on the suite of Microsoft tech tools said in a Friday morning post that it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress." That statement came some 22 hours after the page first said the company was investigating reports of issues with email access.

✦ Extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting•From 4 sources•1 min read•Updated November 13, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC
Key points
  • From city governments in the US to spy agencies in Australia, the Microsoft outage is being felt around the world.
  • Countless businesses, schools, hospitals, and governments have found out the hard way what it means to rely on a single company’s systems to get things done.
  • Microsoft has apologised for the issue, which it said was due to a technical failure.

Many businesses and consumers were unable to communicate through digital channels as a global outage of some Microsoft services left people scrambling.

Additional details
  • tech: Though not exposed by an outage, the Trump administration's sanctions on the International Criminal Court prompted the Netherlands-based court to move off of Microsoft software to avoid its work being paralyzed.
  • Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) over President Trump 's Kennedy Center takeover, saying the outage prevented them from "completing the necessary coordination." In a separate filing, Beatty's team acknowledged they were impacted as well.
  • Reality check: Shay Cleary, a National Center for State Courts consultant who specializes in tech and cybersecurity, emphasizes that courts typically have manual back-up plans in place.
  • Multiple court documents reviewed by Axios show lawyers requesting deadline extensions or alerting judges to the outage impacting their work.
  • "Many of the people who work in courts are dedicated public servants, and they can figure out how to do things right," he adds.

How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →

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Every article behind this summary — 5 articles from 4 outlets

BBC NewsNovember 13, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC → Global News WorldNovember 13, 2026, 8:24 PM UTC → AxiosNovember 13, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC → BBC NewsNovember 13, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC → WiredNovember 13, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC →

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