24 hours and counting: Microsoft says 'sorry' for global outage

Microsoft has apologised for a global outage in its latest statement. The outage disrupted access to Teams, Outlook and its Copilot AI software for almost 24 hours, while the company ruled out a cyberattack. The company said that the disruption was caused by a technical failure linked to an earlier network capacity upgrade, rather than malicious activity or problems involving artificial intelligence 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," Microsoft said in a statement on X.

Earlier, Microsoft warned users to prepare for a prolonged disruption. The technology giant said it was seeing early signs of stabilisation and improvements in service capacity as recovery efforts continued while they extended email timeline for 48 hours. Microsoft also said that it was seeing "improvements" for Outlook email and other services amid an outage that was disrupting public services and businesses around the world. In an update it noted “broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia-Pacific.”

“We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue. To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours, Microsoft said in a post on X. The company added that a comprehensive update is available under incident number MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. It also said: “Recovery actions continue across Microsoft, the company says in its latest update, adding it is seeing “incremental improvement in several workloads”, adding, ”service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline. Network and traffic-management actions remain active."

Is it a cyberattack?

Microsoft has ruled out possibility of a cyber attack with senior technology reporter Chris Vallance saying that Microsoft has stated that there's nothing malicious about this incident. "When you look at previous outages of this kind, that affected a lot of different services, it's hard to think of one that was due to a cyber attack," he said. "Most of them have been due to things going wrong internally rather than malicious action," he added, so there's "certainly no reason to doubt" what Microsoft are saying at this stage.