"Deeply sorry": Microsoft apologises after global outage hits key services, reveals what caused it

California: Microsoft has apologised after a global outage disrupted Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Copilot for nearly 18 hours, affecting millions of users across more than 70 countries. The company has traced the disruption to a technical issue linked to a previous network capacity upgrade, ruling out a cyberattack or problems involving artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said in a statement posted on X on Friday. The company added that it was seeing "broad recovery and stability" across its services.

Explaining the cause, Microsoft said an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade surfaced following a more recent network change. It said the underlying problem had been addressed, although some customers and regions were still experiencing disruptions.

Microsoft said it was restoring services gradually, checking stability at every stage to manage the scale of demand. Although the process took longer, the phased restoration helped ensure services returned reliably, it said.

The company has promised a detailed post-incident report after completing its review.
Also read | Microsoft restores parts of affected infrastructure; Outlook disruption continues

Indian airlines among those affected

The outage disrupted businesses, schools, government agencies and airline operations across several countries. In India, the impact extended to passenger support systems, with major airlines issuing advisories over problems with their email services.

IndiGo said its email support had been affected and that it might not be able to receive customer emails, while other customer support channels remained available.

Akasa Air also reported delays in email support and advised passengers requiring immediate assistance to contact its 24-hour customer care centre or reach out through social media.

Air India, meanwhile, said its flight operations remained unaffected. The airline temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer communications continued to reach it.

Financial services firms and other businesses also reported difficulties accessing research material and handling client interactions.
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Outlook outage reports crossed 1.3 lakh

The disruption affected some of Microsoft's most widely used services, including Outlook email, Teams and Copilot. AI service connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic were also impacted.

Downdetector, a website where users report online service problems, recorded 1,38,058 reports of Outlook issues at its peak around 1 pm ET on Thursday. The number of reports fell to 34,490 by Thursday evening.

Reports related to Microsoft 365 also dropped to nearly 13,000 by 5.47 pm ET, while 763 users reported problems with Teams during the same period.

The outage highlighted the dependence of businesses and organisations on Microsoft's cloud ecosystem, with disruptions to email, workplace communication and AI-assisted tools affecting routine operations across multiple regions.