Microsoft reveals cause of global Outlook outage and apologizes

A global outage in Microsoft services caused over 12 hours of instability in Outlook, Teams, and other tools, affecting millions of users worldwide. The company apologized on Friday and reported progress in restoring systems. Microsoft attributed the failure to a problem during a previous network capacity update, which manifested after a recent infrastructure change. It ruled out a cyberattack, stating that unexpected server unavailability overloaded remaining equipment, and recovery had to be gradual for stability. The outage disrupted businesses, government agencies, and airlines across 74 countries, with preliminary estimates from Kovrr suggesting up to $16 billion in productivity losses. Some institutions resorted to manual procedures, and recovery was first observed in North America and Europe.