Hyderabad: Microsoft services restored worldwide after an outage lasting more than 36 hours, the company announced on Saturday. Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications became available again after the company completed corrective measures. However, Microsoft continued monitoring its systems and the status of delayed email messages.
The disruption began on Thursday, November 12, when users encountered problems accessing Exchange Online mailboxes. It later affected several services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, Planner and To Do.
Most basic messaging and online meeting functions in Teams continued to work. However, Exchange-dependent features, including calendars and meeting scheduling, faced problems. Copilot users also struggled to open chats and retrieve information linked to emails, calendars and files.
Microsoft traced the incident to a technical issue involving an earlier expansion of network capacity. The problem surfaced after the company made another network change recently. It ruled out a cyberattack or an AI agent as the cause.
Microsoft services restored through a phased recovery
The company said it brought the affected services back in stages rather than restoring everything at once. It checked system stability at each stage before making services available again.
Microsoft also extended the timeout period to 48 hours. The measure was intended to help delayed emails reach users and allow pending messages to be processed.
The company apologised to users and partners for the inconvenience caused by the disruption. It said it would publish a detailed report explaining the incident after completing its investigation.
The outage renewed concerns about organisations relying heavily on cloud-based services. The disruption also underlined the need for businesses to maintain alternative arrangements to continue operations when major technology platforms become unavailable.