The disruption began Thursday morning as a Teams problem before knocking Exchange Online mailboxes and core servers offline worldwide. An earlier network capacity upgrade interacted with a recent network adjustment to spark the incident, though Microsoft confirmed no cyberattacks or artificial intelligence tools contributed. To protect critical user communications during the recovery, the company expanded email timeout limits to 48 hours to halt bouncing messages. Most systems experienced broad recovery by Friday afternoon as message backlogs dropped to normal thresholds.
Key points
The global outage stemmed entirely from an internal technical conflict between earlier ne…: The global outage stemmed entirely from an internal technical conflict between earlier network upgrades and a recent change.
Essential public services were severely hindered, forcing Japanese officials to paper doc…: Essential public services were severely hindered, forcing Japanese officials to paper documents and British police to phone reports.
System restoration was deployed gradually across the global network to preserve operation…: System restoration was deployed gradually across the global network to preserve operational stability and clear email backlogs.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Microsoft has apologised for the global outage that knocked Outlook, Teams and Copilot offline for millions of users for the better part of a day. It has also finally explained what went wrong. The company says the disruption was caused by "a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents." It traces the problem to an earlier network capacity upgrade, where a fault crept in and only showed itself after a more recent network change.
The explanation comes nearly 24 hours after users first began reporting trouble on Thursday, around noon US Eastern time. That was close to 10:30 pm in India. Microsoft says it has fixed the underlying issue and is seeing "broad recovery and stability" across its services. Some customers and regions are still waiting for service to return, and the company has promised a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
Microsoft's full statement on the Outlook and Teams outage
In a statement shared on social media, Microsoft said:
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners.…
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Essential operations across 74 countries and territories suffered severe disruptions after an internal technical failure disabled core digital communication tools and services starting Thursday. The incident compromised major platforms including Outlook and the Copilot AI assistant, causing widespread operational standstills across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Impacted organizations faced crippled workflows while government officials underscored the growing global vulnerabilities tied to concentrated so…