Government Forms Emergency Response Team Over MS365 Access Outage

Coordinates with Microsoft Korea to address impact
Cause linked to network capacity upgrade

The government has formed an emergency response team to address the impact of a major outage affecting Microsoft services.

The Ministry of Science and ICT said on Nov. 14 that it had formed an emergency response team with Microsoft Korea and was monitoring service restoration and the impact of the outage.

The ministry is checking reports of user inconvenience and damage through Microsoft Korea and has directed major domestic platform operators to inspect their own systems to prevent outages.

Since Nov. 12 (local time), access disruptions have continued for more than 24 hours across major Microsoft services, including the Outlook email service, the Teams business collaboration platform, and Copilot, an AI-powered work assistant. Microsoft 365 Personal services have now returned to normal, and a significant portion of the business services has also been restored.

Microsoft said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or an AI-related issue. Rather, a problem that arose during an earlier network capacity upgrade surfaced after a network change, leading to the disruption.

Microsoft said, "We deeply apologize for the inconvenience caused to our customers and partners," adding, "We will provide a comprehensive incident investigation report once our review is complete."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.