Microsoft Issues Apology as Global 365 Outage Disrupts Businesses and Governments

A Global Digital Standstill

Microsoft has issued a formal apology following a significant, multi-day outage that crippled access to its 365 suite of tools. The disruption, which began around midday ET on Thursday, hindered the operations of businesses, government agencies, and airlines across the globe. By Friday morning, the company confirmed that services were in the process of recovering and stabilizing, though a definitive timeline for a complete restoration of all systems remained unannounced.

In a statement shared via X, the tech giant expressed deep regret for the impact the incident had on its partners and customers. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” the company stated. Microsoft clarified that the root cause was a technical issue stemming from a recent network upgrade, explicitly stating that the failure was not the result of a cyberattack or issues involving AI agents.

Scope of the Disruption

The outage affected a wide array of critical Microsoft 365 products, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Power BI. At the height of the incident on Thursday, Downdetector recorded over 130,000 reports of issues with Outlook in the United States alone, highlighting the scale of the reliance on these platforms.

The ripple effects were felt across various sectors. In the United States, the House of Representatives reported that its users were impacted, while the electric-truck manufacturer Workhorse Group was forced to postpone a scheduled quarterly earnings call. The aviation industry also faced challenges; Air India and IndiGo both reported disruptions to their email support channels, though both carriers emphasized that actual flight operations remained secure and unaffected.

International government agencies in Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines also reported experiencing knock-on effects from the system failures. Additionally, the outage impacted the AI sector, as connectors to Microsoft 365 tools for platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic were disrupted. Anthropic noted that while it began to see signs of recovery by Friday, the ongoing nature of Microsoft’s incident meant that intermittent errors could persist.

An Unusually Long Recovery

While major tech companies have faced service interruptions in the past, this particular event stands out due to its duration. Lasting more than 22 hours, the incident appears to be one of the longest 365-related outages in the company’s history. It surpassed the duration of a major 2022 disruption, which took approximately 16 and a half hours to resolve.

Microsoft had previously flagged that the strain on its infrastructure was not caused by a surge in customer traffic, but rather by an unexpected unavailability of a number of servers. This follows a series of other cloud-related issues in the tech industry, including Microsoft’s own Azure cloud service disruptions in late 2026, as well as significant outages experienced by Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services in previous years.

As of Friday morning, Microsoft’s public service status page continued to reflect “service degradation” for both consumer and business products. The company continues to work toward full restoration, emphasizing that the underlying issue has been addressed.

Source: businessinsider.com