Microsoft apologises for widespread outages and reveals the cause

US technology company Microsoft has publicly apologised to customers and partners for widespread disruptions that affected several of its services around the world. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the company stresses that the cause was a technical fault, not a cyberattack, artificial intelligence or so-called AI agents. The outage affected a large number of businesses and also disrupted the work of government institutions.

What happened

On Friday, Microsoft said the problems had affected a broad range of Microsoft 365 products that interact with Exchange Online and email services. Users reported that the Outlook email system, the Teams collaboration platform and the Copilot AI assistant were not working.

The cause

The company explains that the technical issue arose during an earlier network capacity expansion and became apparent after recent changes to the network configuration. Microsoft says the root cause has been fixed and that it is continuing to restore services for the customers and regions still affected.

Restoration

According to the company, most services have already regained operation and stability. Because of the high volume of demand, services were restored gradually, with system stability checked at each stage. This approach took longer but allowed a safer and more stable recovery.

Microsoft's statement says it understands the trust customers place in its services and takes its responsibility for keeping them running very seriously. The company has promised to publish a full report on the incident once its review is complete.