REDMOND, Wash., Nov. 13 (TodayViralUSA) — Microsoft said Friday that it is “deeply sorry” for a global outage that knocked out Outlook email and disrupted Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services for more than a day, and that the failure stemmed from an internal technical problem rather than a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.
The company said it was seeing “broad recovery and stability” across its services and had addressed the underlying issue, while it continued restoring service to remaining customers and regions.
What went wrong
In a statement posted on X, Microsoft said the incident “was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.” It said it restored services gradually because of the scale of demand, validating stability at each stage. “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” the company said, adding that it will publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
The problems began Thursday around midday Eastern time with Exchange Online, the cloud service behind business email in Outlook, and spread to features that depend on it, including Teams calendars, Copilot and SharePoint. Microsoft said at one point that several servers had become “unexpectedly unavailable” during automated health checks, and that servers it brought back online were being overwhelmed again by returning traffic.
A worldwide disruption
Outage tracker Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the peak on Thursday, and reports came in from 74 countries and territories, according to Al Jazeera and USA Today. The figures reflect user complaints rather than a verified count of affected customers.
The impact reached well beyond office inboxes. In Britain, police forces were unable to take online crime reports and NHS staff fell back on paper records, according to the PA news agency. Government systems in Singapore and Japan were also affected, and Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had likened the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, the Associated Press reported.
The disruption also hit third-party tools: OpenAI and Anthropic said their connectors to Microsoft 365 were affected, Business Insider reported. In the U.S., Workhorse Group delayed its quarterly earnings call because of the outage.
What users should expect
By Friday morning in the U.S., Microsoft said email queues were “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,” but warned that some users could still see intermittent access problems and delayed messages as their apps reconnect. Microsoft has said it found no indication of malicious activity.
Sources & Credits
- Microsoft on X: Microsoft statement on the Microsoft 365 incident
- Associated Press: Global Microsoft outage hits companies and governments
- PA via KentOnline: Microsoft ‘deeply sorry’ for disruption caused by major global outage
- Al Jazeera: Microsoft hit by global outages: What happened and why?
- USA Today: Is Microsoft down? Users report issues with Outlook, 365
- Business Insider: Microsoft’s Outlook outage is in its 2nd day. Here’s what we know.
- The American Bazaar: Microsoft struggles to restore Outlook, Teams and Copilot after global outage hits 74 countries
- Petri: Microsoft deploys configuration patch to stabilize global Microsoft 365 outage
Image: Microsoft sign at the Redmond campus by Derrick Coetzee, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Join the conversation