"Deeply Sorry For Disruption": Microsoft Apologises After Global Outage

Microsoft on Friday issued an apology to customers and partners following a global outage that disrupted several of its services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Copilot, saying it is witnessing "broad recovery and stability" across its services.

In a statement posted on X, Microsoft said the disruption was caused by a technical issue linked to an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a recent network change. The company clarified that the incident was not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. 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. 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 stated on X.

The company said it had addressed the underlying issue and was continuing to restore services for customers and regions that were still experiencing disruptions.

Explaining the restoration process, Microsoft said services were brought back gradually, with stability being validated at each stage, given the scale of demand.

"While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration. We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete," the company said.

The global outage left millions of users without access to Microsoft's services for nearly 18 hours, disrupting businesses, schools, government agencies and airline operations across at least 74 countries, including the United States.

Major services affected included Outlook email, Microsoft Teams and Copilot. The disruption also impacted airline operations worldwide, prompting major Indian carriers to issue passenger advisories. The incident also impacted AI service connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic.

Data from the outage-tracking platform Downdetector highlighted the scale of the disruption, with reports of Outlook outages peaking at 138,058 around 1 pm ET before declining to 34,490 by Thursday evening.

Complaints related to Microsoft 365 also fell to nearly 13,000 by 5:47 pm ET, while 763 users reported issues with Teams during the same period.

Microsoft said it would publish a detailed post-incident report after completing its review of the disruption, as services continue to return to stability. 

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