Microsoft Outlook services for S’pore Govt fully restored: GovTech

SINGAPORE – Microsoft Outlook services for the Government have been fully restored, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) said on Nov 14.

In a statement, a GovTech spokesperson said: “Microsoft Outlook services for the Singapore Government have been fully restored since 11pm on Nov 13. We thank members of the public for their patience and understanding.”

The announcement comes a day after various government agencies were hit by a Microsoft outage affecting millions of users globally.

The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, Singapore Land Authority, SingHealth and the Singapore Police Force noted in separate Facebook posts late on Nov 13 and the morning of Nov 14 that their e-mail services were up and running.

The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority and Singapore Customs said in their respective Facebook pages on the afternoon of Nov 14 that they had resumed their FormSG services.

FormSG is a government tool that allows public officers to create secure digital forms for data collection.

Aside from government agencies, Microsoft’s services have also resumed in the private sector here.

Banks such as DBS Bank, UOB and Maybank said on their respective Facebook pages that their e-mail services had been restored.

In a media reply to The Straits Times on Nov 14, a Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) spokesperson said that the varsity’s e-mail services had been restored as at 11am on the same day.

“SUSS is monitoring the situation to ensure that services remain stable,” the spokesperson added.

On Nov 14, Microsoft said that services had fully recovered across Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other applications, Reuters reported.

This ended a global outage that crippled online communications across businesses and governments for over 24 hours.

Checks by ST on Microsoft’s service health page on Nov 14 showed that all products were operational, with the company noting that the e-mail backlog for Microsoft 365 consumers “(had) been processed”.

In a media statement on the same day, a Microsoft spokesperson apologised for the disruption.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that Microsoft saw “broad recovery and stability” across its services and that the issue was not related to cyber or artificial-intelligence agents.

“The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.”

The spokesperson also said that Microsoft would provide a full post-incident report once its review was complete.

Reports of issues with Microsoft Outlook peaked at 1,135 at about 9.30am in Singapore on Nov 13, gradually falling to 347 at about 8.45pm that same day.

While banks were among those in the private sector affected by the disruption, core banking operations were unaffected.

The outage, reports of which started climbing around 5.25pm GMT on Nov 12 (1.25am on Nov 13, Singapore time) according to Ookla, was one of the longest in Microsoft’s history and the second disruption to its services in 2026, Reuters reported.

Microsoft said the outage specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online – its cloud-based e-mail and scheduling hub – with unconnected applications not affected.

Reuters reported that Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking at nearly 20,000 a minute, more than 1,500 times the normal level.