After a worldwide disruption to its online services, Microsoft reported full recovery on 14 November 2026. Businesses in Germany were also affected by the problems. In Rhineland-Palatinate companies and chambers of commerce and industry reported particular restrictions on email communications, while several public institutions said they remained operational.
The outage began on 12 November and affected, among other services, Outlook email and other services in the Microsoft 365. According to Tagesschau, calendar functions, video conferences and the Copilot AI assistant were also affected for a time. On 13 November, Microsoft initially reported progress in restoring services; on the morning of 14 November, the company said they were running again.
The impact in Germany varied from one organisation to another. The chemicals group BASF headquartered in Ludwigshafen told SWR that emails and calendars had been affected worldwide and had at times worked only with delays. Production had not been affected; Teams and telephone calls, among other options, had remained available for internal communications. The technology group Schott in Mainz also told the broadcaster of problems, but said production was unaffected.
The Koblenz Chamber of Commerce and Industry told SWR that it had received no external emails and that messages could not be sent internally either. The Chamber of Skilled Crafts in Kaiserslauternreportedly experienced similar difficulties. Boehringer Ingelheim confirmed to the broadcaster that it had been affected, but gave no details of the extent.
The situation was different for some parts of the public administration. According to SWR, the city administration and police in Kaiserslautern said their email systems did not run through Microsoft's cloud, so they had not been affected by the outage. Several hospitals contacted by the broadcaster also reported no impact. According to Rhineland-Palatinate's finance ministry, the state government, ministries and subordinate authorities used local systems rather than Microsoft's cloud solutions.
For the federal administration, the Federal Office for Information Security also largely gave the all-clear on 13 November: it was operational and had been largely unaffected by the outage. A spokesperson for the relevant federal ministry, however, told Deutsche Welle that German businesses had been significantly affected. The statements concern different areas and therefore do not allow for a general assessment of all institutions in Germany.
Microsoft attributed the outage to a technical problem with an earlier expansion of network capacity, which became apparent after a later network change. The company said the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack or by artificial intelligence activity. The incident showed how differently an outage of central services can affect organisations: key factors included which applications an organisation used and whether other means of communication were available.
Editor: Daniel Mayer (Article created with AI assistance).