Microsoft apologizes, fixes cause of 24-hour 365 outage

Microsoft ↗ 0.17% said Friday, November 13, that it had fixed the underlying cause of a Microsoft 365 outage. For close to 24 hours, the failure knocked out Outlook and disrupted Teams and Copilot for users in dozens of countries. The company apologized and said the problem started during an earlier network upgrade, CNBC reported.cnbc.com

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said, adding that it was "seeing broad recovery and stability across our services," according to CNBC. The company said in a post on X that "this was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents." It said the incident "was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change". Microsoft said it restored services gradually and checked stability at each stage, which "took longer." It promised a full post-incident report once its review is finished.macrumors.com+3

A slow recovery

The problems began after midday US Eastern time on Thursday, November 12. Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. Reports peaked at 19,650 per minute, compared with fewer than 15 on a typical Thursday. Microsoft first blamed "elevated load" on its infrastructure across several regions. It paused deployments and restarted servers. Later it said a process that sets up secure connections had become overwhelmed, so servers stopped handling requests.bbc.com+4

Early fixes did not hold. At one point Microsoft said its changes were "not taking as expected," before it reported "early stabilization and capacity improvements". By about 9 a.m. New York time on Friday, the company said email queues were "significantly reduced and approaching normal levels." Users of more than 20 products could still see errors, Bloomberg reported.apnews.com+1

Governments, courts and markets hit

The outage brought government offices, traders and businesses around the world to a standstill. British police forces could not take crime reports online, and pharmacists warned that prescriptions could be delayed. The outage also hit Japan's shared government IT platform, courts from Los Angeles to Singapore, and Australia's spy and federal police agencies. Euronext told listed companies to send corporate information by telephone. US House staff said their work had stopped, and one aide told Politico: "There goes a day of legislative work". Schools, medical facilities and some transport services were also affected.nbcnews.com+3

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft did not think it was dealing with a cyberattack. He compared the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, describing it as "an update that has gone awry".apnews.com