Microsoft has apologized for a global service outage that left millions of users unable to use its apps, saying the cause was not a cyberattack.
The software giant said on Friday that it was deeply sorry for the global outage that affected millions of users. The company said the failure was not related to cyberattacks or AI agents, but was triggered by an earlier "network capacity upgrade," and that it cannot yet say when service will be fully restored.
On the same day, Microsoft described its recovery progress as "encouraging" and said it was working to deal with the aftermath of the outage.
The failure left Teams, Outlook and the AI software Copilot unavailable in at least 70 countries.
The company had also said earlier that some users could still run into intermittent access problems.
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) made a statement on Friday that the outage "inevitably" had a "disruptive impact" on its staff, but that appointments were going ahead as normal.
Around the world, some schools have asked parents to get in touch by phone. The U.S. federal government and court system have also reported related problems.
The outage began on Thursday, when multiple Microsoft 365 services failed on a wide scale, affecting government agencies, businesses and individual users in many countries. It is the second interruption of Microsoft 365 services this year.
The first disruption this year was on Jan 22, when Outlook, Teams and other services went down for several hours.
Microsoft apologizes for global outage, rules out cyberattack
