Microsoft says sorry for global outage

Microsoft said all its products and services were operational on Saturday and apologised to its customers, after a massive global outage disrupted Outlook email and other workplace applications for more than a day, attributing the incident to a network capacity upgrade issue and apologising to customers and business partners for the disruption.The company's service health page displayed the message "All products are operational" on Saturday morning, covering both Microsoft 365's business and enterprise services as well as its consumer products.The company had faced mounting pressure to restore its services after the outage, which began on Thursday, November 12, and continued into Friday, disrupting access to email, virtual meetings, cloud-based applications and other workplace tools. Microsoft had earlier said it was seeing gradual improvements across affected regions, but warned that some users could continue to experience intermittent access issues and delays in email delivery.Also Read: Microsoft rules out cyberattack as global outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot"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," Microsoft said in a post on X.The company said the disruption was caused by a technical issue and was not related to cyber activity, artificial intelligence or AI agents. Its investigation traced the problem to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a subsequent network change.Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying issue but restored services gradually, given the scale of demand, checking stability at each stage of the recovery process. While the approach extended the restoration time, it helped ensure services remained stable as users reconnected, the company said.The disruption centred on Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email infrastructure, and spilled over into several services that depend on it. Apart from Outlook, users reported problems accessing Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Defender XDR, among other services. Some users also faced difficulties accessing calendars, scheduling meetings and retrieving work-related information through Copilot.Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions. Its investigation subsequently found that a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure. The company clarified that the problem was not caused by a surge in user traffic.The recovery process proved more complicated than initially expected. Microsoft said some servers that had been brought back online became unresponsive again when traffic was redirected to them, forcing its engineering teams to explore alternative ways to restore capacity. It also made changes to traffic management and gradually brought affected infrastructure back into service, monitoring stability as more users reconnected.The company had also linked the incident to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying issue and was working towards restoring services across the remaining affected regions.Also Read: The Microsoft trap: One outage can bring the business world tumbling downThe outage had a wide geographical footprint, with users reporting disruptions in multiple countries and territories. The problems affected businesses, government agencies and individual users, highlighting the extent to which organisations rely on Microsoft's cloud-based productivity ecosystem for routine operations.In India, users began reporting problems accessing Microsoft services late on Thursday, with complaints rising again on Friday morning. Among affected companies, airline IndiGo had said its email support channel was affected and that it might not be able to receive customer emails, while other support channels remained available."We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. Please note that this was a technical issue, not related to cyber or AI agents," wrote Puneet Chandok, the company's President for India and South Asia, on a LinkedIn post."Our amazing teams both in India and globally were able to work through a very challenging situation to restore service. Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. This took longer, but it helped ensure a stable restoration," he added.Microsoft executives had also sought to rule out concerns about a possible cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was no indication that the disruption was the result of malicious or cyber activity.The company apologised to customers and partners for the…