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Microsoft announced that its consumer services had fully recovered at 4:10 p.m. UTC on Friday while enterprise Microsoft 365 services showed sustained improvement after the outage that started the previous day. The company stated it continued monitoring email backlogs accrued during the disruption before declaring the incident fully resolved. “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft wrote on X. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.” The firm added that it would publish a complete post-incident report once its review concluded, according to multiple reports including from Reuters.
The outage originated from an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that emerged after a recent network change, Microsoft explained in its service status updates. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, confirmed late on November 13 that there was no sign of malicious cyber activity. The company explicitly ruled out any connection to AI or cyber attacks while focusing recovery efforts on gradual restoration to handle massive demand, Reuters reported.
Outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded reports from 74 countries and territories with more than 130,000 complaints for Outlook in the United States at peak intensity. The service accumulated over 7.4 million total problem reports worldwide as the outage stretched across workdays in Asia, Europe and North America. Figures from the platform showed a steady decline in new incidents as Microsoft deployed fixes on November 14, according to data cited by The Jerusalem Post and The Hindu.
Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States numbered among those impacted alongside airlines, financial firms and trading operations that turned to backup systems, Reuters reported. Euronext, operator of multiple European exchanges, instructed listed companies to use telephones for identity verification during the disruption while some businesses resorted to faxes and Bluetooth transfers. CNN Business noted that the outage could result in billions of dollars in lost productivity given the reliance on these tools by hundreds of millions of users.
Microsoft 365 services reach more than 430 million people globally, a scale that magnified effects of the incident, the company has stated on its website. This event stands as one of the longest in the company’s history and the second disruption to its services in 2026, Reuters analysis of prior incidents found. Organizations hosting Microsoft tools on private servers rather than in the cloud generally faced fewer complications, the news service added.
The technology firm described seeing encouraging recovery progress in Europe, Japan and North America although some users initially encountered intermittent problems. Engineers extended email timeout windows to 48 hours to protect delayed messages and prioritized backlog processing throughout the restoration. Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying fault and validated stability at each stage of the phased recovery, according to its updates compiled by Bloomberg and The Japan Times.
