Microsoft Traces 365 Outage to Network Capacity Upgrade as Some UAE Reports Linger

The company gave the explanation in a statement on X on Friday and apologised to customers. "We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," it said, adding that it was "seeing broad recovery and stability across our services." Microsoft said it had fixed the underlying issue and restored services in stages, checking stability at each step. "While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," it said. It will publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete.

The explanation goes some way to answering a question for the many businesses and government agencies that rely on Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams and Copilot: whether a cyberattack or an AI system caused one of Microsoft's longest recent disruptions. The outage began late on Thursday, November 12, and got worse on Friday morning.

On Friday, Microsoft said its consumer services had recovered and that it was still monitoring its enterprise services, according to Reuters.

In the UAE, problems had not fully cleared. On Saturday morning Downdetector UAE was still showing an alert for possible problems with Microsoft 365, according to Gulf News. Outlook reports peaked at nearly 400 late on Friday morning, fell close to zero by Friday night, then rose slightly from early Saturday until about 9am. Among Outlook users, 42 per cent of complaints were about the app, 31 per cent about receiving messages and 16 per cent about logging in. Downdetector counts reports that users submit themselves, so its figures show trends rather than how many people were affected.

The complaints about receiving messages could reflect email that piled up during the outage still being delivered. Microsoft earlier extended email retry periods to 48 hours to stop delayed messages from being lost. Companies will get more detail when the post-incident report is published. Microsoft has not given a date.