The global disruption of Microsoft services has been attributed to a failure that arose during a network capacity update. This incident caused platforms such as Teams, Microsoft 365, and Copilot to be unavailable to users for more than 20 hours.
The company has expressed its regret for what happened, by highlighting in a statement shared on X the "disruptions that this incident has caused to customers and partners," an account that it will expand with more details in a later document.
In that same note, the technology company clarifies that the problem has nothing to do with any cybersecurity breaches or with the operation of its artificial intelligence systems, but rather that it originated in "an earlier network capacity update that arose after a recent change in the network."
Once the underlying "problem" was identified—responsible for keeping the services down for more than 20 hours—Microsoft decided to restore operations progressively. The company explains that, "given the scale of demand," this strategy "took more time," but it "helped to ensure a stable restoration" of the affected tools.
The incident began to be noticed on Thursday afternoon, with access and functionality failures in Microsoft Teams, which soon afterward spread to the Exchange Online mailboxes. This domino effect ultimately impacted the rest of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, in addition to Copilot, SharePoint, and Defender XDR.
The widespread outage of Microsoft infrastructure also affected two of the market’s main 'chatbots,' Claude and ChatGPT, by impacting the connectors that allow their integration within Microsoft services. However, this setback did not alter the use of these tools when they are used independently outside the company environment.