An anonymous employee with a verified Microsoft account says the Microsoft 365 outage dragged on because all the senior engineers had left. (Previously: Microsoft 365 suffers massive 36-hour outage! Announces full recovery, says issue was caused by network capacity expansion) (Background: Microsoft offered a voluntary separation program to 60,000 employees—nearly 25% of its workforce. What happened?) The official explanation for the massive Microsoft 365 outage was a network capacity expansion issue. But an employee with a verified Microsoft account wrote on Blind that the outage took so long to resolve because all the senior engineers who truly understood the systems were gone… What did the whistleblower say? Blind is an anonymous workplace forum where users verify their identity with a company email address. On November 13, an employee with a verified Microsoft account posted on Blind’s India forum. In the post, the employee said the outage had lasted more than 12 hours and that “people inside the company say” even IcM, the internal incident management tool, wouldn’t open. They wrote that rollbacks—reverting a problematic change to the previous version—used to take just 45 minutes, but this time took five hours. At 3 a.m., the people on the emergency response call were exhausted engineers at Microsoft’s India Development Center (IDC), facing black-box services left behind by departing employees. The employee also made clear that outsiders still didn’t know the root cause, and they weren’t speculating about whether it was a botched deployment or an out-of-control AI script. Another anonymous commenter agreed, saying the company had “pushed out every L65+ architect who truly understood the network architecture.” Does this match Microsoft’s official explanation? First, it’s important to distinguish between the two: Microsoft addressed “why it broke,” while the whistleblower talked about “why it took so long to fix.” In an apology post on @MSFT365Status (at 2:05 a.m. Taiwan time on November 14), Microsoft said it was a technical issue unrelated to a security attack or AI/agents. The cause was a problem left over from an earlier network capacity expansion, which surfaced after a recent network change. The outage was first reported at 1:54 a.m. on November 13, and Microsoft announced that it had resolved the root cause at 2:09 p.m. on November 14. The whistleblower mentioned that the rollback took five hours instead of 45 minutes and that IcM wouldn’t open. Microsoft’s official statement mentioned neither of these things. How many people have actually left Microsoft over the past two years? There’s no way to verify the claim that “everyone’s gone” using public figures. But there is an official program that offers context for the claim that “senior employees were encouraged to leave.” In 2025, Microsoft laid off more than 15,000 employees. In April 2026, Microsoft launched its first voluntary retirement program, open to employees whose age plus years of service totaled at least 70. Around 8,750 people were eligible, and according to GeekWire, about 30% accepted. The eligibility threshold singled out older employees who had spent the longest time at Microsoft. In July, the company laid off another 4,800 people. Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said these roles weren’t being replaced by AI, but that AI was changing how people work. In October, Microsoft offered voluntary separation to around 60,000 employees, including in India. The decision won’t be made until the first week of December. That means this group won’t decide whether to leave until December, and they aren’t included in the number of people who have already left. What do outside observers think? Technology analyst Rupert Goodwins, interviewed by Al Jazeera, said that experienced people who built the systems had already left, and the company may be losing its institutional memory of how those systems were built. However, he stressed that it was still early and that we didn’t know all the facts. Meanwhile, Walter Pasquarelli, a researcher at Cambridge’s Bennett Institute, said there was currently no evidence that the outage was caused by massive traffic generated by AI systems. Related coverage Outlook suffers a global outage, leaving employees stunned: emails won’t send, Teams meetings can’t be scheduled, and Copilot is down too Microsoft lays off another 4,800! Xbox launches a major reset and sells off four studios; HR chief clarifies: AI isn’t to blame AI layoffs backfire! 55% of companies that cut jobs admit they were wrong; Ford takes three years to rehire 350 veteran engineers “Anonymous Microsoft employee claims all senior engineers have left: Here’s why it took so long to fix this Microsoft 365 outage” was originally published on BlockTempo (動區動趨—The Most Influential Blockchain News Media).