Microsoft Restores Services After Global Outage, Blames Network Upgrade Issue

Microsoft said its services were fully restored on Saturday after a massive global outage disrupted Outlook email and other workplace tools. The company apologised to customers and attributed the incident to a problem linked to a network capacity upgrade.

The company’s service health page showed “All products are operational” on Saturday morning, covering Microsoft 365 business and enterprise services as well as consumer products.

Microsoft said the outage was a technical failure and had nothing to do with cyber activity, artificial intelligence or AI agents. It said the problem began during an earlier network capacity upgrade and surfaced after a recent network change.

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said the investigation found technical challenges, including cascading failures and “thundering herds” at the network perimeter, which complicated recovery.

The outage began late on Thursday and hit businesses worldwide, including Indian airlines and financial services firms. IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air reported disruptions to their email-based customer support, limiting their ability to receive or answer some passenger queries. Air India temporarily rerouted its email services so that customer messages kept reaching it. Flight operations were not reported to be affected. Financial firms struggled to access research reports and interact with clients.

The disruption mainly affected Microsoft 365 features tied to Exchange Online, the company’s cloud-based email platform. Users had trouble reaching their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and desktop apps, and email delivery was delayed.

Outage-tracking platform Downdetector logged more than 1.3 lakh reports of Outlook-related problems, with disruptions reported across 72 to 74 countries.