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Microsoft says day-long outage triggered by technical issue; rules out role of AI, cyber agents
In a statement, Microsoft said the underlying issue has been “addressed”, adding that it continues to “restore service to remaining customers and regions.”
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Microsoft on Friday said the widespread outage affecting its services was triggered by a technical snag, which occurred during an earlier network capacity upgrade, and surfaced following a recent network change. It said that the particular issue had been addressed, and that a broad recovery of services was underway.
The company, in its statement on X, ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the outage or any link to artificial intelligence (AI) or agents.
“This was 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 said. It further added, “We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.”
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An outage had disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services on Friday, with users across 72 countries reporting problems. The complaints were reported across Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, affected email access, calendar functions and workplace communication, with several businesses and government agencies reporting operational problems.
The company apologised to its customers and partners for the disruptions, while asserting that it takes the “responsibility” for its services “extremely seriously.” Microsoft said that it would provide a full post-incident report once its review is completed.
‘Encouraging recovery progress’: Microsoft shares update on service outage
In its latest post on X, Microsoft said it was “seeing broad recovery and stability” across its services. The company said that its services were restored gradually owing to the scale of demand, adding that it had validated stability at each stage. “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” Microsoft said.
In earlier updates on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X, the company said it had been witnessing “encouraging recovery progress”, adding that the availability of services and email delivery performance had improved across a “growing portion” of the affected infrastructure.
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The company said email queues had “significantly reduced” and were approaching normal levels, and assured that it had implemented additional mitigation measures. Providing region-wise updates, Microsoft said there had been “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained” progress across much of Europe. It further highlighted “encouraging recovery signals” in Asia Pacific, while adding that some users could still face intermittent issues.
Microsoft said its teams were “reviewing what happened” to prevent any such future issues. It said any residual service issues were being investigated and service health was being closely monitored.
