Microsoft deeply sorry for global outage after 24 hours of disruption, reveals cause

Microsoft said the outage was traced to an issue that emerged during an earlier network capacity upgrade and was triggered after a more recent network change. It said recovery was deliberately carried out in stages rather than through a single large-scale restart.Microsoft has apologised for a global outage that disrupted access to Teams, Outlook and its Copilot AI software for almost 24 hours, while ruling out a cyberattack as the cause of the incident. The company said the disruption was caused by a technical failure linked to an earlier network capacity upgrade, rather than malicious activity or problems involving artificial intelligence agents.In a statement posted on X, Microsoft said services were now broadly recovering but acknowledged the scale of the disruption and its impact on customers."We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services," Microsoft said.'NOT RELATED TO CYBER OR AI'Microsoft said the outage was traced to an issue that emerged during an earlier network capacity upgrade and was triggered after a more recent network change. "This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions," it added.The outage affected several widely used Microsoft services at the same time, leaving users unable to access tools they depend on for work, communication and email. The company had earlier warned that it was still dealing with the "residual impact" of the failure as engineers worked to restore affected infrastructure.SERVICES CAME BACK GRADUALLY Microsoft said recovery was deliberately carried out in stages rather than through a single large-scale restart."Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration." The company had initially described the situation as showing "encouraging recovery progress", with service availability and email delivery improving across an increasing portion of the affected infrastructure."We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us," Microsoft said.The company also stressed that there was no evidence pointing towards a deliberate attack.- Ends