Microsoft apologised for a major global outage that disrupted services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, affecting millions of customers and partners. The company blamed a network capacity upgrade issue, confirmed broad recovery and promised a detailed post-incident report.
Microsoft has expressed deep regret over a major global service outage that disrupted millions of customers and business partners, affecting access to several widely used services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and its AI assistant Copilot. The company said services were gradually returning to normal after hours of disruption across multiple countries.
In a statement posted on X on Friday, Microsoft said it was “deeply sorry” for the inconvenience caused to customers and partners worldwide. The technology giant acknowledged the trust users place in its services and said it takes its responsibility towards maintaining reliable operations extremely seriously.
The company also confirmed that it was witnessing broad recovery and improved stability across its services, while efforts continued to restore access for customers and regions still experiencing disruptions.
Explaining the cause of the outage, Microsoft said the incident was triggered by a technical issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade. The problem surfaced following a recent network change and was not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.
According to the company, the disruption involved server health-check failures that caused affected servers to become unavailable. These failures prevented parts of Microsoft’s infrastructure from functioning normally, resulting in widespread service interruptions.
Initially, Microsoft attempted to resolve the issue by testing configuration changes and restarting affected servers. The company also introduced an alternative health-check method, which enabled some of the affected servers to return to service.
Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying technical issue and was continuing restoration work across the remaining affected infrastructure. However, due to the enormous scale of demand, services were restored gradually, with stability being verified at each stage.
The company acknowledged that the phased restoration process took longer but maintained that the approach was necessary to ensure services remained stable after recovery.
The outage, which began on Thursday night, continued to affect businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday. The disruption highlighted the dependence of organisations and individuals on Microsoft’s cloud-based platforms and digital infrastructure for everyday operations.
Outlook users faced difficulties accessing email services, while Microsoft Teams disruptions affected workplace communication and collaboration. The unavailability of Copilot also added to the challenges for users relying on Microsoft’s AI-powered productivity tools.
Earlier, Microsoft had reported encouraging signs of recovery, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across an increasing portion of the affected infrastructure.
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The company has promised to publish a comprehensive post-incident report after completing its internal review. The report is expected to provide further details about the technical failure, the restoration process and measures taken to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
Microsoft’s apology comes as businesses and customers worldwide await the complete restoration of services following one of the major disruptions to its digital platforms.
