Dilara Hamit
13 November 2026•Update: 13 November 2026
Microsoft said Friday that a widespread outage affecting its services was caused by a technical issue unrelated to cyber activity, artificial intelligence or AI agents, apologizing to customers and partners as recovery efforts continued.
“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents,” the company said in a statement.
Microsoft traced the disruption to an underlying problem introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that emerged following a recent network change.
The company said the issue had been resolved, with services showing broad recovery and stability, although restoration efforts were continuing for remaining customers and regions.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said.
“We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”
Microsoft said it had restored services gradually due to the scale of demand, verifying stability at each stage of the process.
“While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” it said.
The company pledged to publish a full post-incident report once its investigation was complete.
The outage began Thursday with Exchange Online, which powers business email through Outlook, and continued into Friday.
It also disrupted features in other Microsoft 365 services that rely on Exchange Online, including Teams calendars, Copilot and SharePoint.
The disruption affected communications at businesses, schools and government agencies, with some users continuing to experience access problems and email delays as services recovered.
