Microsoft said on Friday that its consumer services had fully recovered following a global outage that interrupted online communications for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours. Its Microsoft 365 enterprise services were also showing sustained recovery, the company said, as it reported progress in restoring access after the prolonged disruption.
The company traced the incident to a problem introduced during an earlier upgrade to network capacity. Microsoft said it had corrected the underlying issue and was reviewing what happened. It plans to release a full report on the incident once that review has been completed, providing a fuller account of the disruption.
In a statement posted on X, Microsoft apologized to customers and partners affected by the outage. “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” the company wrote. It also said it took seriously the responsibility that came with customers placing their trust in its services.
Microsoft said the scale of demand had shaped its approach to bringing services back online. Restoration proceeded in stages, with checks at each step to confirm that services were stable. Its Friday update distinguished between full recovery for consumer services and the sustained recovery it was observing across its Microsoft 365 enterprise offerings.
The problems first emerged at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users began reporting that they could not access Outlook. Within roughly an hour, outage tracking site Downdetector had received reports from 74 countries and territories, including Israel. According to Reuters, reports of Outlook problems in the United States exceeded 130,000 at their peak.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, addressed the possible cause in a post on X late Thursday. He said there was no indication that malicious activity or cyber activity was behind the outage.
The disruption was the second affecting Microsoft 365 services this year, following an outage in January. That earlier incident lasted almost nine hours after a data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was taken down for maintenance, triggering a similar cascading effect.
Microsoft 365 also experienced an outage in October last year. Separately, an outage affecting Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform last month disrupted the company’s productivity software and affected a range of industries around the world.
