Microsoft has apologised after an 18-hour global outage hit several of its services and millions of users worldwide. The technology giant said it was due to a technical glitch related to a recent network capacity upgrade.
The outage began on Thursday and affected businesses, organisations and individual users who rely on Microsoft 365 for emails, online meetings and everyday work. The outage showed how much workplaces depend on Microsoft’s cloud-based services to run their daily operations.
In an official statement, Microsoft said the problem occurred after a “network change related to capacity upgrade”. Key services in multiple regions were down, so customers couldn’t access some platforms.
Microsoft Explains What Caused the Global Outage
“The outage was caused by a technical problem on our network infrastructure, not an external security threat,” the company said.
Microsoft said its engineering teams found and fixed the problem. But it took longer to get services back up completely because so many users were trying to reconnect.
The company phased services back online (monitoring system performance and stability as they came back online) so that traffic returning to the affected platforms would not be disrupted further.
No Cyberattack or AI Involvement, Says Microsoft
The outage also raised questions about a possible cybersecurity incident as users worried about their accounts and information being compromised.
Microsoft addressed these fears by saying it had not found malicious activity behind the disruption. The company also said AI agents could not have caused the incident.
“At this time we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident,” Microsoft said.
The clarification was to reassure customers that the disruption wasn’t a cyberattack but a technical infrastructure problem.
Microsoft Services Gradually Return to Normal
By Friday, Microsoft said most of its affected platforms were back up and working more reliably, but engineers were still trying to get access restored for some customers who were still having problems.
The company admitted inconvenience to businesses and users who use its services for communication, collaboration, and productivity.
“We are very sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said.
Company Promises Detailed Outage Report
Microsoft said it takes its responsibility for reliable digital infrastructure seriously. It also promised to publish a post-incident report when it completes its internal investigation.
The report is expected to add further detail about the network upgrade, technical failure and steps being taken to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The 18-hour outage once again showed how important it is to have reliable cloud infrastructure (especially if an organisation depends on a single technology ecosystem for their business).
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