Microsoft Services Broadly Recovering After Nearly 24-Hour Outage

Microsoft services were broadly recovering by Friday afternoon, nearly 24 hours after problems first began, and the company said it was "deeply sorry" for the disruption to its products, including Outlook and Teams, according to BBC News.

The trouble started on Thursday, 12 November, when users began reporting difficulty accessing Microsoft 365 products. Microsoft first acknowledged the problem at 17:54 GMT that day, saying users in the Americas were unable to reach Exchange Online mailboxes. Exchange Online is the hosted email service that Microsoft provides as part of its Microsoft 365 suite of office software.

The outage reached well beyond the Americas. It affected users in more than 70 countries, and more than 430 million people worldwide use the affected Microsoft products, the report said.

Microsoft said the problem was a technical issue introduced during a "network capacity upgrade." The company said the outage was not related to cyber activity or to artificial intelligence agents.

Recovery was gradual. On Friday, Microsoft said it was making "encouraging progress," and email queues, the backlogs of messages waiting to be delivered, were nearing normal levels.