Microsoft 'deeply sorry' for global outage after almost 24 hours of disruption
Microsoft experienced a massive 24-hour global service outage affecting Outlook, Teams, and various critical infrastructure worldwide. The company attributed the disruption to a technical error during a network capacity upgrade rather than a cyberattack.
Why it matters
The incident highlights the extreme systemic dependency of global governments, healthcare, and businesses on a small number of centralized cloud service providers.
Image source, Bloomberg via Getty Images Image caption, Products such as Microsoft Teams and Outlook have been out of service for much of Friday
Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the service outage to its products, including Outlook and Teams, which has caused disruption around the world.
Services were broadly recovering by Friday afternoon, nearly 24 hours after issues first began, as Microsoft said it was making "encouraging progress" and email queues were nearing normal levels.
The outage hit more than 70 countries, disrupting everything from business operations to government services and personal users. More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide.
Microsoft said the problem was a technical issue introduced during a "network capacity upgrade" and not related to cyber or artificial intelligence agents.
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