Microsoft says issue fixed as 365 recovery continues

Microsoft said Friday that it had addressed the underlying technical issue behind a global Microsoft 365 outage, but warned that some customers could still face intermittent access problems and delayed email as services recovered.

The disruption began Thursday, November 12, and affected services connected to Exchange Online, including Outlook and some Microsoft Teams functions. Microsoft reported broad recovery and stability across its services by Friday, while continuing to report degradation in services that rely on Exchange Online. The company did not provide a timetable for full recovery.

Microsoft attributed the incident to a technical issue introduced during an earlier network-capacity upgrade that surfaced after a later network change. It said the outage was not related to cyber activity or artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s explanation comes from its own service updates; it has promised a fuller postincident report after its review is complete.

The company said it restored services gradually, checking stability at each stage. In a Friday update, it said queued messages were still being processed and traffic rebalanced. Microsoft cautioned that access could return before...