Microsoft said it had fully restored its consumer services, including Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other apps, after an outage that lasted more than a day, Reuters reported on Friday, November 13.
The company also warned that restoration of its Microsoft 365 business services is still underway. Before officially declaring the issue with its business services resolved, the company’s specialists are “monitoring the queue of email messages that accumulated during the outage,” Microsoft explained.
"Given the severity of the impact of this incident, we will continue monitoring for a longer period to ensure no additional troubleshooting measures are needed," Microsoft said.
Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack or AI failure as the cause
Microsoft said the outage was a "technical issue unrelated to cyber threats or artificial intelligence." "The problem stemmed from an earlier error made while increasing network capacity and surfaced after recent changes to the network infrastructure," the company explained, adding that it was restoring services gradually.
"Although it took longer, this approach helped ensure a stable recovery. We will provide a full post-incident analysis report once our investigation is complete," the company promised.
A major outage affecting Microsoft services in various countries began on November 12. The disruptions affected ordinary users as well as businesses and government agencies. They also affected Outlook and Teams, two of the most popular applications used for work by hundreds of millions of people. Downdetector recorded more than 7.4 million reports worldwide.
As Reuters notes, the outage was one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second time its services have gone down this year.