Microsoft apologizes for the global outage and explains its reasons

Microsoft announced that it had addressed the “fundamental problem” that caused a widespread outage affecting millions of users around the world, stressing that it is currently witnessing “a general recovery and stability in all its services.” The company previously wrote on the “X” platform, Twitter: “We deeply apologize for the disruption this incident caused to our customers and partners.

We realize the amount of trust they place in our services, and we take this responsibility seriously.” Microsoft provided an explanation about the reasons for the malfunction that began Thursday, stressing that it was a purely “technical problem” and had nothing to do with cybersecurity or artificial intelligence.

The company explained that the malfunction resulted from "a problem that occurred during a previous process to upgrade the network capacity, and appeared after recent changes were made to the network." The software giant also stated that it would issue a “detailed report on the incident” after completing its review.

On the other hand, the Anderson Economic Group, a research institution based in the US state of Michigan, estimated on Friday the cost of productivity losses resulting from this disruption that struck Microsoft services at about $7 billion. It is noteworthy that this outage, which began at noon on Thursday (Eastern US time), prevented employees from accessing the Outlook email service, Teams meeting tools, and other essential tools in the modern work environment, in addition to Copilot, the company’s artificial intelligence assistant.