Microsoft said Saturday, Nov. 14, that Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services were restored worldwide after an outage of about 30 hours linked to a network-capacity upgrade problem.
Microsoft linked the outage to a problem with an earlier network-capacity upgrade that appeared after a later network change. The disruption began Thursday and affected services connected to Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud email and scheduling system. Users in dozens of countries reported problems.
Businesses and government agencies said the outage disrupted email, meetings and other work. Some airlines also reported delays in responding to customer questions. Flight operations were not reported to be affected.
Microsoft apologized and said the incident was a technical problem, not a cyberattack or an issue involving artificial intelligence. The company restored services in stages and checked that they were stable as it did so. Microsoft continued to monitor its systems and emails that had been delayed.
A Microsoft executive said failures triggered further failures. The executive said many devices trying to reconnect at once made recovery more difficult. Microsoft said it would publish a review of the incident.
The widespread disruption renewed questions about organizations relying on one provider for essential workplace tools.