Microsoft on Friday attributed a nearly 24-hour global outage affecting its major services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, to a technical issue linked to an earlier network capacity upgrade, ruling out any involvement of cyberattacks or artificial intelligence agents.
The technology giant apologised to customers and partners for the widespread disruption, which affected businesses, government agencies and other organisations dependent on its cloud-based services.
Microsoft said the underlying problem had been addressed and that its services were showing broad recovery and stability, although restoration efforts continued for some customers and regions.
The disruption began on Thursday and continued into Friday, leaving users across several countries unable to access emails, attend online meetings or use other Microsoft 365 applications.
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Explaining the cause, Microsoft said the outage originated from a problem introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which became apparent following a more recent network change.
"This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents," the company said in its statement.
The clarification came amid online speculation that the disruption could have resulted from a cyberattack or malfunctioning AI agents.
Microsoft maintained that neither malicious activity nor artificial intelligence systems were responsible for the incident.
Earlier, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, had also stated that there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity behind the outage.
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The outage affected several widely used Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint and Copilot.
Users reported difficulties accessing email accounts, sending and receiving messages, joining virtual meetings and using cloud-based workplace applications.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, nearly 130,000 problem reports were recorded during the disruption, with complaints emerging from more than 70 countries and territories.
Government departments, businesses, educational institutions and public services were among those affected.
The disruption also affected some third-party services that rely on Microsoft's infrastructure and software integrations, including connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Microsoft said it had deliberately restored services in stages to ensure that systems remained stable as users regained access.
The company explained that the scale of demand required careful monitoring during the recovery process, rather than attempting to restore all services simultaneously.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services," Microsoft said.
The company added that it had addressed the underlying technical issue and was continuing efforts to restore services for remaining affected customers and regions.
Earlier attempts to stabilise the systems had encountered difficulties, with Microsoft reporting that some servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
The company subsequently introduced traffic optimisation measures to improve capacity and service stability.
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Microsoft said it would provide a comprehensive post-incident report after completing its investigation into the disruption.
The incident highlighted the dependence of businesses and public institutions on cloud-based communication and productivity platforms.
With Microsoft 365 services widely used for workplace communication, document management and online collaboration, the disruption affected operations across multiple sectors.
Although the company reported substantial recovery by Friday, some users continued to experience difficulties as restoration efforts progressed.
Microsoft said it would continue monitoring service stability and working to restore normal operations for all affected customers.