Microsoft has apologised to customers and partners after a global outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for millions of users, saying the disruption stemmed from a technical fault and not from a cyberattack or artificial intelligence (AI) agents.
In a statement on X, the company said it was "deeply sorry for the disruption" and was seeing "broad recovery and stability" across its services. It added that it knew the trust customers place in its products and took that responsibility "extremely seriously".
Microsoft traced the failure to an earlier network capacity upgrade. The problem, it said, only surfaced after a subsequent network change. The company said it had addressed the underlying issue but was still restoring service to some remaining customers and regions.
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It also explained why recovery took so long. Because of the sheer volume of demand, Microsoft brought services back in stages and checked stability at each one. "While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," the company said, promising a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
Scale Of The Disruption
The outage hit users in at least 74 countries, including the United States. Businesses, schools, government offices and airline operations were affected, and some services were reportedly unavailable for close to 18 hours.
Several Indian carriers issued advisories to passengers as the disruption rippled through travel systems. Connectors used by AI platforms, including those of OpenAI and Anthropic, were also reportedly affected.
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Outage-tracking platform Downdetector logged more than 1.38 lakh reports of Outlook problems at the peak, around 1p.m. Eastern Time. Complaints fell sharply as services were restored, though reports of problems with Microsoft 365 and Teams continued for a time.
The incident has again exposed how heavily companies and governments depend on a handful of cloud providers. A fault in one provider's network can quickly stall email, meetings and operations across industries and borders.
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