Microsoft apologises for day-long service outage, blames network capacity upgrade gone wrong

Microsoft issued an apology on Nov. 14 (Singapore time) for the massive outage that saw many companies' email and software services go down due to connectivity issues.

CNBC quoted a Microsoft spokesperson as saying, “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.”

Technical issue

The statement, which was also shared on social media, said that the outage was a technical issue and was not related to cyber or AI/Agents.

It explained that the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that had surfaced after a recent network change.

Microsoft said that it has since addressed the underlying issue and was continuing to restore services to remaining customers and regions.

However, due to the scale of demand, services were restored gradually, with the company “validating stability at each stage.”

This took longer, but helped “ensure a stable restoration.”

It also said it would provide a full post-incident report after it completed a review of the incident.

Global outage

The outage affected companies globally, including Singapore, on Nov. 12 to 13.

It affected Microsoft’s Outlook Email service, as well as its Microsoft 365 suite of office software services, which included the collaboration tool Teams, as well as SharePoint and Copilot.

But while Microsoft worked to restore services, it said it was taking precautions such as extending the window where delayed emails continued to attempt delivery to 48 hours.

CNBC reported that Microsoft had said during initial updates on Nov. 12 that the problems were related to "elevated loads” on infrastructure across multiple regions, due to “a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure.”

Initial fears from affected companies and government officials were that the outage was due to some kind of "nefarious" activity, as commented by one U.S. legislator speaking to CNBC.

The Straits Times reported that while several government and business organisations had experienced a disruption to email services, critical services like emergency services and national security readiness was not affected.

The legislator, Josh Gottheimer, a congressman from New Jersey and a former Microsoft employee, said he was concerned about the size, length, and timing of the outage.

Several tech-related content creators saw the funny side of the outage, however, with many performing skits about how tech employees were spending their time in the office as they were unable to complete any work.