Microsoft apologizes for global outage: We regret the impact, can rule out cyberattack
Microsoft issued a formal apology about the global Microsoft 365 outage that started Nov. 13 and extended into the next day.
Updated on Friday, Nov. 13 at 12:35 p.m. ET — Microsoft has now issued a public apology; our original story has been updated with the latest statement from the company.
On Friday morning, as Microsoft worked to bring an end to a global Outlook and Microsoft 365 outage, the company issued a public apology to its customers.
In a statement posted to its X account, the company wrote, "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."
The company also ruled out a cyberattack or problems related to AI agents, and pledged to "provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete."
The Microsoft outage started on Thursday, Nov. 13 and continued into Friday morning, disrupting work for people around the globe. As Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot started to come back online Friday, the company initially issued a statement expressing its "regret" to customers.
"We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure," said Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, in a statement to Mashable. "We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward."
An update posted by the Microsoft 365 Status account on X at 10:39 a.m. ET also addressed the rumors that a cyberattack was the cause of the outage.
"We will continue to share more information as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity," the post reads. "Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward."
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Despite making progress toward recovery, the company's Service Health Status page still listed both Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Consumer Products as suffering from ongoing "service degradation," as of this writing.
The company's full public apology stated:
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.
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.
Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.
We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.
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