S’pore hit by global Microsoft outage, but Singpass, emergency, core banking services not affected

SINGAPORE – E-mail services across organisations in Singapore, including in the government and banking sectors, were disrupted on Nov 13 amid a global Microsoft outage affecting hundreds of thousands of users.

In a media reply on the same day, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) confirmed that some government systems were hit by the disruption, adding that it was working with the tech giant to restore the affected services. While public officers could still use Microsoft Teams internally, e-mail replies to public inquiries might be delayed, a GovTech spokesperson said.

Emergency services remained fully operational, while Singpass was not affected, the spokesperson said. In a Facebook post, the police said that their e-mails were affected by the outage, but the public could still contact them on 999 or SMS 70999 for urgent police assistance, or call their hotline on 1800-255-0000 for other matters.

In a media reply, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “The Ministry of Defence and the Singapore Armed Forces’ operational systems and readiness are not affected by the outage.”

The hours-long disruption also hit Microsoft’s products such as Teams and AI assistant Copilot, with international news agency AFP reporting that users in 74 countries and territories were affected.

On Downdetector, reports of issues with Microsoft Outlook peaked at 1,135 at about 9.30am in Singapore, gradually falling to 347 at about 8.45pm.

“We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” Microsoft said.

The company also said that it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”.

GovTech advised the public to contact the respective government agencies’ call centres for urgent matters and check their official websites or social media channels for updates on e-services.

Among government agencies in the Republic that were affected by the disruption here was the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, which warned taxpayers on social media platform X at about 9.30am of difficulties sending e-mails, directing them to Live Chat or myTax Mail on the myTax Portal instead.

Other statutory boards and government ministries, such as the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the Ministry of Home Affairs, were also hit by the disruption, as well as all three public healthcare clusters – SingHealth, National University Health System and NHG Health.

The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) confirmed that the digital SG Arrival Card was unaffected. However, ICA noted in a Facebook post at 1.30pm that responses to some services submitted via FormSG might be delayed, advising those needing urgent assistance to use the ICA feedback form or call 6391-6100.

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

The Singapore Courts noted in a Facebook post at 12.15pm that the disruption could affect incoming court application requests and replies to e-mail queries. Online court filing systems and their automated e-mail alerts remained operational, and those with urgent matters could call 6587-8423, the Courts said.

The Pasir Ris-Changi, Tanjong Pagar, Nee Soon and Tampines town councils said in social media posts that they were also impacted, reporting varying issues across their e-mail, online feedback and call centre services.

Private sector, schools also hit

The private and educational sectors were also affected by the outage, with banks here reporting e-mail disruptions, though core banking operations were unaffected.

The Association of Banks in Singapore said affected banks, particularly those providing retail banking services, had also put up notices across various channels, including their websites, to alert customers to the outage.

UOB reported e-mail connectivity issues at about 10am, while DBS Bank warned on its website of delayed e-mail replies, advising customers to check transaction push notifications via the DBS/POSB digibank app instead.

DBS added, in a social media update later, that transactions via its ATMs, cards, and the digibank and PayLah apps remained unaffected.

Maybank Singapore said in a Facebook post at about 12.40pm that all its digital and physical banking services remained safe and operational, though e-mails might be delayed, and directed customers to its digital channels, ATMs, self-service terminals and physical branches.

The global Microsoft outage also disrupted the e-mail system of financial services group PhillipCapital, insurance provider Prudential and national carrier Singapore Airlines. SIA said in a Facebook post its operations were not affected, adding that all flight operations and other services continue to operate as scheduled.

The e-mail services for Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) and the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) were also affected by the disruption.

SIT said in a media reply that its Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, learning management portals and administrative systems were operational, while SUSS said separately that no disruptions to other systems were reported, with alternative platforms available to disseminate important announcements and updates to its community.

Microsoft working to improve server stability

The outage also hit government agencies from Australia to Japan and the US, as well as companies, including American AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic, Reuters reported.

Reuters reported a spokesperson for Germany’s digital ministry as saying that the outage was likely to have a significant impact on German businesses.

According to Bloomberg, the outage also forced traders to do business by phone and WhatsApp, with some even firing up fax machines.

Bloomberg reported that about 200,000 users reported issues with Microsoft’s services on Downdetector, and that the disruption was among the company’s most significant.

According to Reuters, this was the second disruption to Microsoft’s 365 services in 2026.

Microsoft said in an update on its service health status webpage at 1.46pm that it is pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the cause of a traffic influx and repair affected backend infrastructure.

Reuters reported Microsoft as saying on the night of Nov 13 (Singapore time) that the tech giant is seeing “encouraging recovery progress in Europe, service availability and e-mail delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure”.

In a media reply, Associate Professor Anupam Chattopadhyay said that Microsoft provides services through a complex technology stack, distributed physically across geographies and through various technology partnerships for components such as servers, software and databases.

“There can be multiple points of failure, ranging from a network switch error, a server health issue or database configuration mistake,” said Chattopadhyay, who hails from Nanyang Technological University’s College of Computing and Data Science.

He added that a bunch of servers went down simultaneously, requiring traffic to be re-routed, causing more servers to be overwhelmed, leading to a “cascading failure”.

While traffic-induced server failures happen “all the time”, there are failsafe mechanisms in place which do not affect the user experience, Chattopadhyay said, adding that the mechanisms include protection against targeted denial-of-service attacks.

In this Microsoft incident, “the disruption is possibly distributed in such a manner that was not foreseen”, he added.

Resolving an issue of this scale is a “gargantuan task”, Chattopadhyay said. For instance, resolving a network switch error, with geographically distributed servers, requires “highly coordinated hunting of the root cause of failure and simultaneously fixing it”, he added.

“In a few scenarios, this may require one to physically access the server,” he said. “Considering Microsoft managed cloud services are physically located in more than 500 data centre facilities, this is a gargantuan task.”