Microsoft blames 365 outage on a network upgrade issue and says it was not an attack

Microsoft apologized on Friday, November 13 for the global Microsoft 365 outage, which left businesses and governments without Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services for more than 24 hours, according to The Jerusalem Post, citing Reuters. In a statement reported by ABC7, the company said it was “a technical issue” unrelated to cyberattacks or to artificial intelligence or agents.

According to that statement, the incident originated in an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced after a recent network change. Microsoft says it has fixed the underlying problem and restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage, which took longer, according to ABC7. The company will publish a full report once its review is complete.

Microsoft said its consumer services had fully recovered and that recovery of its enterprise 365 services was holding, according to The Jerusalem Post. In its latest post on X reported by ABC7, early on Saturday, the company said it was monitoring for an extended period because of the severity of the incident and was checking the accumulated email before considering it resolved.

The problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday and within an hour Downdetector logged reports from 74 countries and territories, with more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the peak, according to Reuters, cited by The Jerusalem Post. It is the second Microsoft 365 disruption this year, after the one in January, according to the same outlet.

Microsoft has not yet detailed which specific network change caused the outage or how many customers were affected.