Korea forms emergency team after MS365 outage

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has formed an emergency response team with Microsoft Korea after a global Microsoft 365 outage disrupted services for more than 24 hours. The team was announced on November 14 and is tasked with monitoring recovery efforts, tracking domestic damage and collecting user complaints related to the disruption.

The ministry’s move responds to widespread operational issues affecting businesses and individuals that rely on Microsoft’s cloud tools. By coordinating directly with Microsoft Korea, officials aim to reduce inconvenience for local users and obtain timely updates on the pace and completeness of service restoration.

The outage began on November 12 and affected Microsoft’s main services across the board, including the Outlook email service, the Teams collaboration tool and Copilot, its artificial intelligence work assistant. Incident reference MO1550821 identified symptoms such as failed email sending and receiving, Outlook launch failures, and unavailable Teams and SharePoint features.

In South Korea, some companies experienced email traffic disruptions on November 13 as a result of the Microsoft 365 error. Problems were reported in 74 countries, and nearly 130,000 Outlook problem submissions were reported in the United States at one point; these figures reflect reported problems rather than a verified count of users.

The emergency response team is monitoring service restoration status and user difficulties in Korea through Microsoft Korea. The Ministry of Science and ICT is tracking domestic damage and complaints while seeking detailed restoration updates to understand how quickly normal operations are returning for local organizations.

Beyond immediate response, the ministry has asked major domestic platform operators to conduct internal system reviews and preventive checks. These reviews are intended to help reduce the risk that similar outages will disrupt domestic digital services in the future, extending the response beyond Microsoft’s own infrastructure.

Microsoft has stated that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or an artificial intelligence–related problem. Instead, the company explained that a flaw created during a past network capacity expansion remained hidden until a subsequent network change exposed it, triggering the widespread disruption.

Services have been restored gradually, with Microsoft checking stability at each stage because of the scale of demand. Consumer Microsoft 365 services have returned to normal, and most enterprise services have also been restored, though administrators have been urged to verify service health and confirm that critical workflows such as email, calendar access and collaboration tools are functioning properly.