Microsoft said “All products are operational” on its service status page on Saturday morning, more than 24 hours after a global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and other workplace tools.
The status page covered both its business and enterprise services under Microsoft 365 and its consumer products, Bloomberg reported.
The outage began on Thursday, and continued into Friday. It cut access to email, virtual meetings and cloud-based applications for businesses, government agencies and individual users in several countries.
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Microsoft had said earlier that it was seeing gradual improvement across affected regions, but warned that some users might still face intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery.
The company said the disruption was caused by a technical fault and had nothing to do with cyber activity or artificial intelligence (AI) agents. It traced the problem to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced after a subsequent network change.
Microsoft Executive Vice-President Charles Lamanna said there was no indication of malicious activity.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said in a post on X. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”
Microsoft said the disruption centred on Exchange Online, its cloud-based email infrastructure, and spread to services that depend on it. Besides Outlook, users reported trouble with Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Defender XDR.
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Some also struggled to open calendars, schedule meetings and retrieve work information through Copilot.
The company’s explanation of the cause changed as the outage went on. It first blamed elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions.
Its investigation later found that a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, putting extra pressure on the rest of the infrastructure. Microsoft said the problem was not caused by a surge in user traffic.
Recovery proved harder than expected. Some servers that were brought back online became unresponsive when traffic was redirected to them, forcing engineers to look for alternative ways to restore capacity.
The company changed its traffic management and returned infrastructure to service in stages, checking stability as more users reconnected. It said this slowed the restoration but helped keep services stable.
ALSO READ | Microsoft Outage: Services Partly Restored As Microsoft Restarts Affected Infrastructure
In India, users began reporting problems late on Thursday, and complaints rose again on Friday morning. IndiGo said its email support channel was affected and it might not be able to receive customer emails, while its other support channels remained available.
Microsoft 365 is one of the world’s most widely used workplace platforms, with more than 430 million people using its applications. The company has promised a detailed post-incident report once its review is complete.
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