Microsoft continues to restore Outlook email after outage, rules out ‘cyber or AI’ agents

Microsoft (MSFT) said on Friday afternoon that the outage, which prevented users from accessing its software tools, including email, was a technical issue unrelated to AI agents or “cyber”. The company said it is seeing broad recovery and continues to restore service to the remaining customers and affected regions.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” said the company in a statement.

“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents,” added the company.

Microsoft said the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. The connectivity issues, which began Thursday, were being worked on for hours, with the company at one point indicating that servers that had been brought back online became unresponsive again.

By Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific.

“Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure,” said the update on X.

On Thursday afternoon, Microsoft said users of Exchange Online, which powers Outlook email, as well as the company’s Teams videoconferencing app and Copilot AI chatbot, may experience disruptions. In a separate post on X, the company said users “in any region” could be affected.

Microsoft said it was rerouting connection traffic across its global infrastructure and restarting affected servers. Around 7:05 p.m. ET, Microsoft said some servers were becoming unresponsive again as traffic returned, underscoring that the company had not yet fully stabilized the outage.

Friday morning, Microsoft said, “Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods.”