Microsoft apologized for the disruption, which hit government agencies in Australia, Japan, and the US, and said it was a technical issue, not a cyberattack.
Follow us on GoogleMicrosoft said on Friday that its consumer services had fully recovered and that it was seeing sustained recovery for its Microsoft 365 enterprise services, after a global outage that disrupted online communications for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” the company wrote on X. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.
“The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade,” Microsoft continued, adding that it had fixed the underlying problem and would publish a full post-incident report once its review was complete.
The company said it had restored services gradually, checking that they were stable at each stage, because of the scale of demand.
No sign of hacking after global outage, Microsoft executive says
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, wrote on X late Thursday that there was no indication the outage was the result of malicious or cyber activity.
Problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users reported they could not reach Outlook, and within about an hour, Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories, including Israel.
At its peak, the site showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US, according to Reuters.
Microsoft’s second 365 outage this year
It was the second disruption to Microsoft’s 365 services this year, after an outage in January, and follows another in October last year. Last month, an outage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform also hit its productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
The January outage lasted almost nine hours and was attributed to a data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, being taken down for maintenance, setting off a similar cascading effect.
Reuters and Tobias Holcman contributed to this report.
Follow us on GoogleSource: The Jerusalem Post · JERUSALEM POST STAFF
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