Microsoft has identified what caused the global outage that blocked Outlook and Teams and announces when they will be functional again

Microsoft services have begun to be gradually restored worldwide, following a multi-hour outage that affected platforms such as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot on Thursday, November 12, and Friday morning. The problems were experienced by individual users, companies, and public institutions, including in Romania.

Microsoft announced that the main fault had been fixed and stated that the incident was not caused by a cyberattack and was unrelated to artificial intelligence. According to the company, the cause was a recent network change that revealed a problem arising from an earlier network capacity update.

The restoration did not occur simultaneously for all services. Due to the large number of users who tried to reconnect, Microsoft opted for a gradual recovery, checking the network’s stability at each stage. On Friday, at 16:10 GMT, platforms for individual users were functioning normally again, while Microsoft 365 services for businesses were still being restored gradually.

At the peak of the incident, more than 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook in 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector. In Romania, 342 problems were reported with Outlook, 168 with Microsoft 365, and 39 with Teams. Users reported being unable to access emails, delays in sending and receiving messages, and connection errors.

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