Microsoft apologizes for email disruption, says there was no hack
(ABC NEWS)– Microsoft has apologized for its Outlook service disruption Friday morning as email inboxes thawed and some users received a trickle of unread messages, seemingly bringing an end to a global outage that spanned across two workdays.
Microsoft will no longer support Windows 7.(Source: MGN Image)
The outage, first reported by Microsoft early Thursday afternoon, racked up over 100,000 reports on Downdetector, a service monitoring site, within an hour of Microsoft’s report.
While initially reported as an access issue in the Americas, Microsoft later said “the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”
The outage seemingly downed communications across industries, with reports of businesses, governments, schools and healthcare providers all experiencing communication disruptions.
By Friday morning, the tech giant said it was seeing “continued recovery progress … with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific.”
The company also shared that email queues were “approaching normal levels” on Friday morning but warned that users could still have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery ” while service continues to recover.
“Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward,” Charles Lamanna, Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said in a statement.
In a follow-up statement on Friday, Microsoft apologized and indicated the issue did not stem from cyber or AI agents.
“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions,” the company said.
The tech giant first posted a statement on social media saying it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues” accessing online mailboxes shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday.
Downdetector reported issues with Outlook, Teams and other products as Microsoft attempted to deploy several fixes.
“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” Lamanna said late Thursday.
Microsoft said it does not believe it was hacked. Updates throughout the day on Thursday indicated the company believed the issue may have stemmed from an issue with server availability.
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” the company said.
The company has been providing updates on steps to resolve the outage on its Microsoft 365 Status social media account, providing a window into the hourslong effort to troubleshoot the disruption.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” the company said. “Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. We’re focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”
Earlier Thursday, the company said: “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”
Microsoft also reported some users were experiencing issues with Microsoft Teams. The company shortly updated that “mitigative actions have successfully restored service health and functionality.”
Amid the outage, New York City’s Emergency Management Department warned residents of potential delays in reaching city agencies.
“If you are trying to contact a New York City agency by email or access an online City service that relies on Microsoft systems, you may experience delays or temporary disruptions,” NYC Emergency Management said. “These issues may affect the delivery of emails, responses from City agencies, and access to certain online services.”
For more urgent requests, the city advised residents to try using an alternative method to contact the agency, and to call 311 for non-emergency city services and 911 for emergencies.
