NEW DELHI: US-based technology giant Microsoft has restored its services -- ending a worldwide disruption that affected Outlook, Teams and several other Microsoft 365 applications used by businesses and consumers for more than a day.
The tech company updated its service status page, which shows "all products are operational", after users across multiple countries experienced difficulty accessing email, virtual meetings and cloud-based workplace tools since Thursday.
The incident originated from a technical issue linked to a previous network capacity upgrade that was exposed following a later network change, according to the company. It also stated that the outage was not related to cyber threats or artificial intelligence systems.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said in a post on social media platform X, adding that it takes customers' trust in its services extremely seriously.
According to the company, the issue primarily affected Exchange Online, the company's cloud email platform, with knock-on effects spreading to dependent services including Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Defender XDR.
Users reported difficulties accessing calendars, scheduling meetings and retrieving information through Copilot during the outage. Microsoft's assessment of the problem evolved as its investigation progressed.
The company initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure load across several regions before determining that a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, increasing pressure on remaining systems. It later said the outage was not caused by unusually high user traffic.
However, restoration efforts also faced setbacks after some recovered servers became unresponsive when traffic was redirected to them. Engineers subsequently adjusted traffic management processes and restored capacity in phases while monitoring system stability. Additionally, airlines on Thursday said their email support channel had been affected, though alternative customer support channels remained operational.