Microsoft Says It Is “Deeply Sorry” as Global Outlook and Teams Outage Eases
A Microsoft 365 failure that began on Thursday hit users in more than 70 countries; the company blamed a network capacity upgrade and says services are broadly recovering.
Microsoft has apologised for a worldwide failure of its Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, that left offices, governments and individual users without email and chat for much of Friday. The company says services are now broadly recovering, though it has not given a time for a full fix, BBC News reported.
What went wrong
Microsoft said the fault was a technical problem introduced during a network capacity upgrade. It said the incident was not caused by a cyber attack or by artificial intelligence agents.
The company first flagged that users in the Americas could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes at 17:54 GMT on Thursday (11:24 pm IST), and soon warned that Microsoft 365 could be affected globally. By early Friday it reported only a partial recovery in some regions. By the afternoon (GMT) it spoke of wider improvements in North America and Europe and of early signs of recovery in Asia-Pacific.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was deeply sorry for the disruption to customers and partners and took their trust seriously. Microsoft said it was bringing services back in stages so they stay stable, and that a full post-incident report will follow its review.
Who was hit
According to the BBC, the outage reached more than 70 countries, and the affected products have over 430 million users. Those disrupted ranged from the Japanese government and the Supreme Court of the Philippines to an Australian intelligence agency, as well as trains, hospitals and courts in North America.
In the UK, some NHS services, schools and police forces were affected, though the government said emergency 999 calls were largely unaffected. Canada’s national rail operator warned that trip updates by email might not reach passengers. In the US, House of Representatives staff said a full day of legislative work was lost. Singapore’s government said some systems were hit, and in India the outage disrupted work for many users on Friday.
Officials at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, were also unable to use Outlook, the BBC said.
Why it matters
Cyber security experts quoted by the BBC said the episode showed how much businesses and public services depend on a small number of large technology providers, and urged organisations to plan for working without such tools when outages happen.
Featured image: Microsoft sign closeup, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
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