Microsoft apologizes for ongoing global outage; services slowly getting back to normal
· Yahoo TechMicrosoft's suite of services has slowly been recovering from the massive global outage that began Thursday, the company said, as it issued an apology to users of its products, including Outlook and Teams.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," according to an update on the official Microsoft X account. "We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services."
As of 3 p.m. ET Friday, Microsoft's status page showed that most of its services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, were "operational," but also said that users "may be unable to access or perform several actions in Microsoft 365 services."
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The company didn't give an estimated time for when its services would be fully recovered.
Microsoft said the outage was due to "a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change."
Microsoft has addressed the underlying issue and is continuing to restore service gradually, according to the update. "We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete," the company said.
Outlook has more than an estimated 400 million active users worldwide. Teams is used by a reported 320 million people.
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Microsoft first said Friday morning that its recovery efforts were on track, when some users on the outage tracker Downdetector reported that Outlook email had started to return.
The problem began on Thursday, with Downdetector showing a major spike in outage reports that peaked just before 1 p.m. ET. Users reported problems with Microsoft Outlook, Copilot, Teams and SharePoint, with some even reporting problems accessing Microsoft Word and Excel.
In a message posted Thursday at 12:54 p.m. ET on the official Microsoft 365 Status account on X, the company said it was "investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas."
It subsequently confirmed that the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users "in any region."
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Government agencies in Japan, Singapore and Australia were among those affected, while the U.S. House of Representatives was also impacted by the outage. Politico reported one House staffer saying, "There goes a day of legislative work."
AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported facing issues.
In the U.K., police and health services were affected. In Taiwan, Reuters reported that one finance company started using fax machines to confirm trades.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had said it was dealing with an issue similar to the massive CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Microsoft also suffered a widespread outage in September this year, when the Microsoft 365 suite, which includes Outlook, was down for several days.