Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 14 that Microsoft posted a statement on X early this morning Beijing time, apologizing to customers and partners for the global service outage. It said the failure was caused by a network capacity upgrade and was unrelated to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence/agents.
The company said it was “deeply sorry” for the service disruption the incident caused customers and partners. Microsoft said it understands the trust customers place in its services and takes that responsibility seriously; services have now been largely restored and are stabilizing.
The company said the incident stemmed from an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change. Microsoft stressed that this was a technical failure, unrelated to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence/agents.
Microsoft said the underlying issue has been resolved and it is still restoring service for the remaining affected customers and regions. The company said that, given the scale of demand, restoration has proceeded gradually, with stability verified at each stage; the process has taken longer, but helps ensure services are restored reliably.
IT Home previously reported that, on November 12 local time, a major outage affected several of Microsoft’s core Microsoft 365 cloud services, including Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365. Connectivity components used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services were also affected. According to outage-monitoring site Downdetector, reports of problems with Outlook at one point approached 138,058.
Microsoft said it will publish a “full post-incident report” once its review is complete. As of publication, the company had not announced when the report would be released.
Related reading:
“Major global outage of core Microsoft 365 services: Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams affected; services gradually restarting and recovering”
“Major Microsoft 365 outage lasts more than 10 hours; Japanese government forced to use phones to keep working”
“Microsoft executive responds to Outlook and other service outages: Deeply regretful, working around the clock to fix them”
“Outlook and other Microsoft services suffer widespread outage today; affected businesses can apply for service credits”
“Anthropic issues multiple outage updates: Microsoft service disruption affects Claude”
“Major outage affects multiple regions and industries worldwide; Microsoft confirms progress in restoring its main software services”
“Microsoft says Outlook and other services are gradually recovering and stabilizing; some users still awaiting restoration”
“Microsoft: No indication that the grounding of flights across the United States was related to the M365 service outage”