Microsoft: AI, hackers not to blame for Outlook services outage | usagoldmines.com

Microsoft’s consumer services including its Outlook email are “currently recovering” as of Friday morning, and the company said it wasn’t the fault of either malicious activity or AI.

“We’re observing signs of sustained recovery throughout the affected environment, and while our investigation into the underlying root cause is ongoing, we’re continuing to monitor the impacted services to verify service health levels remain stable,” Microsoft reported via its cloud status page.

Microsoft’s outage basically blocked email via Outlook for the entirety of the Thursday workday, and extended into the evening. In a statement posted to Twitter/X, Microsoft apologized and said that the outage was due to network issues.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said. “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,” the company added. “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 outage, however, is still ongoing, Microsoft said. It impacts Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web. Issues with other services may still occur, Microsoft said.

The company will provide a detailed report on the outage at a future time, Microsoft said.