THE HAGUE, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- A global outage affecting Microsoft 365 services has disrupted email communications and digital services at a wide range of institutions across the Netherlands, including government agencies, courts, universities and research organizations.
The outage affected multiple local and provincial authorities in the Netherlands. For example, the Municipality of Twenterand warned that the disruption could delay the receipt and processing of emails, while the provincial government of North Holland said on its website that it was unavailable by email and advised people to contact it by phone instead.
The Dutch judiciary was also affected. The Council for the Judiciary said on Friday that courts were experiencing difficulties sending and receiving emails due to the global Microsoft 365 outage. However, courts remained reachable by telephone.
In the education and research sectors, the University of Twente and Radboud University warned students and staff that Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications might not function properly. SURF, a Dutch cooperative organization providing ICT services to education and research institutions, also reported disruptions.
The Netherlands Institute for Public Safety (NIPV) said its Outlook, Teams and Office 365 online services were experiencing accessibility problems, although the organization remained reachable through its regular telephone numbers.
Allestoringen.nl, a platform that tracks service disruptions based on user reports, received a large number of reports from users experiencing problems with Microsoft's services in the Netherlands.
The disruption affected a range of Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint Online, Power BI, Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as other applications that rely on Exchange Online.
"We're closely monitoring service health and validating recovery across affected connection methods to ensure sustained service stability," Microsoft said in an update published on its official service status website.
"At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete," it said. ■