Microsoft said on Nov. 14 that it had restored services across all products after a global outage that affected government agencies in many countries and lasted more than 12 hours.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the tech giant said in an update on X.
The outage began on Nov. 12 and disrupted a wide range of Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams, and AI assistant Copilot. The Redmond, Washington-based company said more than 430 million people worldwide use Microsoft 365 apps.
Microsoft apologized on Friday and said the incident stemmed from an earlier “network capacity upgrade” that surfaced after a network change. The company has said there was no sign of a cyberattack.
The outage had disrupted government agencies in the United States, Australia, and Japan, and delayed many companies from publishing results to stock exchanges.
A series of posts by Microsoft 365 Status, the company’s official service incident account, on X on Thursday evening indicated that its engineers encountered setbacks while working to resolve the issue.
“The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic; we’re analyzing diagnostic data to determine what’s triggering the behavior,” Microsoft posted at one point.
In an update on Nov. 13, Microsoft said services showed broader signs of improvement across North America and Europe, with recovery also progressing in the Asia–Pacific region. But it warned that some users might still experience “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery” as the company worked to address the remaining affected infrastructure.
“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” Microsoft said in a subsequent post.
Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said on Friday that “technical challenges and failure modes” had made the recovery process more difficult than usual.
Lamanna said he had been working with the engineering team to complete a full post-mortem analysis.
“This was not a cyberattack or an issue caused by AI tooling,” he said in a post on X. “We will publish the post-mortem shortly covering the step-by-step timeline and our many repair items to avoid similar outages in the future.”
Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, who also oversees cybersecurity, said on Friday that Microsoft likened the outage to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, triggered by a faulty antivirus software update.
AJ Thompson, CCO at Northdoor, a cybersecurity and IT consultancy, told The Epoch Times by email that he did not believe the outage was linked to the increased demand for Copilot.
“From Microsoft’s own report, it appears that one, then other servers failed a health check,” Thompson said. “This led to these servers failing across to others, which in turn led to a cascade effect of data access requests which simply overwhelmed these failover servers.”
“It’s not a Copilot overload, but a rather more basic infrastructure issue,” he added.
Chris Summers and Reuters contributed to this report.
