Microsoft apologizes for global outage disrupting Outlook and Teams

Microsoft apologized Friday for a major global outage that disrupted email, messaging, and other services, saying it was caused by a technical issue unrelated to cyber or AI agents. The company reported broad recovery across its services. The outage began around 6pm GMT Thursday, affecting millions of users of Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services. UK government contingency measures were activated, with police and NHS using backup systems, though frontline service delivery saw limited impact. Microsoft attributed the issue to a network capacity upgrade and subsequent network change, restoring services gradually due to high demand. A full post-incident report will follow, while small business groups warned of potential fraudsters exploiting the disruption.