Microsoft said on Friday that the underlying issue behind the global Microsoft 365 outage has been fixed and that the company is now seeing "broad recovery and stability" across its services, after nearly 24 hours of disruption that left users around the world unable to reach their email.
The outage began at about 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, when customers found they could not access Outlook email or use some features in Teams and Copilot. Exchange accounts in Apple Mail were also affected. Most calling, meeting and messaging functions stayed online, though some users ran into errors scheduling meetings or adding calendar entries. Businesses, educational institutions and governments worldwide were affected, and nearly 130,000 Outlook problem reports were recorded on Downdetector shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
Microsoft apologized for the disruption and said the incident was unrelated to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence. The company said the fault was caused by an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said in a statement. "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."
The company said it restored services gradually because of the scale of demand, validating stability at each stage, and that it continues to restore access for remaining customers and regions. Microsoft's Service Health Status page still noted on Friday that some services may be unavailable, and the company said it will publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
The outage was one of the longest Microsoft 365 disruptions in recent years, interrupting email, calendars and collaboration tools for a second day across dozens of countries before the fix took hold on Friday.
