Participants at COP31 complained of coordination issues at the climate summit on Friday (November 13) as an outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams crippled communications.

Microsoft said server issues were behind the incident that also affected its Copilot AI assistant and that a broader roll-out of software fixes was starting to stabilize the system. It said it was not aware of any malicious activity.

Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.

In Turkey’s Antalya, where two weeks of climate negotiations are underway, participants said the outage had proven a hindrance, slowing down workflows and disrupting communication.

The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year.

DESCRIPCIÓN DE IMÁGENES

VIDEO SHOWS: COP31 PARTICIPANTS SPEAKING ON MICROSOFT OUTAGES AND HOW IT HAS AFFECTED THEM

SHOWS: ANTALYA, TURKEY (NOVEMBER 13, 2026) (REUTERS - Access all)

1. VARIOUS OF PEOPLE WORKING ON THEIR LAPTOPS AT COP31 VENUE

2. VARIOUS OF MICROSOFT 365 WEBPAGE NOT LOADING

3. EMAIL FROM COP OPERATIONS TEAM IN OUTLOOK EMAIL

4. (SOUNDBITE) (English) TECHNICAL CLIMATE CHANGE ADVISOR AT THE INUIT CIRCUMPOLAR COUNCIL, JAMES YOUNG, SAYING:

“So, I work for an organisation that's, based in the circumpolar Arctic. And so we have offices spread out, across, several countries. And so in order to coordinate and, like, come together and have positions, we rely on email and Teams and things like that to be able to share information. So it's just been really frustrating and challenging to be able to maintain contact with our colleagues and to be able to effectively participate here. I mean, it's hard enough, when all the tools are working well, but to have like a pretty key communication channel go down and to lose that is not great.”

5. VARIOUS OF PERSON WORKING ON LAPTOP

6. (SOUNDBITE) (English) CLIMATE ADVISOR TO TIMOR-LESTE DELEGATION, ANNA HOPPER SCHULZ, SAYING:

“It's just made it really difficult to access negotiating documents and, share updates, around the negotiations. I would say that fortunately, WhatsApp hasn't been that affected. I think we're more dependent on WhatsApp than we are on Microsoft, but it still has made it very difficult to open and share negotiating documents.”

7. (SOUNDBITE) (English) PART OF BANGLADESH DELEGATION TO COP31, HARUN OR RASHID, SAYING:

‘’Usually I work, I use Microsoft 365 online for my work, and I share a lot of documents with my colleagues. And last night, maybe around 12 a.m. midnight, I found that I couldn't upload…the synchronization was off. My work was not automatically uploaded to the OneDrive or Microsoft365 online. And it's still happening. It's still happening. So, I feel a little bit hampered, because I couldn't share my document with my other colleagues.”

8. VARIOUS OF PEOPLE WORKING ON COMPUTERS

9. (SOUNDBITE) (English) TECHNICAL CLIMATE CHANGE ADVISOR AT THE INUIT CIRCUMPOLAR COUNCIL, JAMES YOUNG, SAYING:

“I think our our dependence on technology leaves us vulnerable to situations like this. The reality is that we assume that these things are always going to be there and are always going to work well, and then when they don't, it really exposes the vulnerability that we have. And I think, you know, it makes things really challenging.”

10. PERSON SITTING ON FLOOR ON LAPTOP