Microsoft apologizes for global outage affecting Outlook and Teams

Microsoft issued an apology for a wide-ranging outage that shut down Outlook and other Microsoft 365 products, as the company worked to restore service after connectivity problems began shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.

“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,” a Microsoft spokesperson said Friday. “We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.”

Cause and restoration

Microsoft said the connectivity disruption stemmed from “an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade.” The company said the underlying cause of the outage had been addressed and that it was still working to restore services to some customers.

Microsoft said it has not detected any malicious activity causing the outage. The company said it would issue a full report once its assessment of the outage was complete.

In an update around 10:30 a.m. ET, Microsoft noted “encouraging recovery progress” and said that “service availability and email delivery performance [was] improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure” as Outlook and other Microsoft 365 tools began to come back online.

Engineering teams have been taking affected systems offline for fixes and bringing them back online gradually in stages. They are prioritizing efforts to preserve emails delayed during the recovery process and reduce email queues and backlogs, extending the timeout window, whereby delayed emails continue to attempt delivery, to 48 hours to help protect messages.

Impact

Email and calendar service Outlook, along with multiple Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint and Copilot, were largely down during the morning hours in the U.S. on Friday and throughout the Asian and European business days. Numerous external services that connect with Microsoft products were also hit.

The U.K.’s National Health Service said the outage was affecting some of its services but that patients should attend appointments as normal. Calls “may be subject to long waits” as a result of disruption to the organization, a hospital group serving South West London and the English county of Surrey said on X.

Earnings for Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont were slightly delayed on Friday due to the outage. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on Nov. 12, rescheduled the release to Nov. 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.

Air India said it had “temporarily rerouted” emails so it could continue to receive customer messages, adding that its flight operations were not affected.

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said in a press conference that Microsoft “believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Reuters reported.

Microsoft shares traded largely flat Friday.

Why it matters

The incident highlights a business “resilience and dependency issue that has been decades in the making,” James Owen, managing partner of Digital Risks at consultancy Control Risks, said by phone.

“We have become, organizationally in the private sector and more broadly, increasingly dependent on a smaller segment of technology and infrastructure as critical to daily life and business activities.”

“Organizations are becoming more aware through a geopolitical lens about what technologies they adopt, whether their services are provided by firms in the U.S., or China, or elsewhere, but this shows the importance of proper recovery planning in the case of an IT outage. That could be manual backups, protocols that do not require internet connection, investing in diverse suppliers and crisis management planning rehearsals,” he said.

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Sources

• theguardian.com: Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook | Microsoft | The Guardian
• cnbc.com: Microsoft works to restore Outlook and other 365 services

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.