In its latest statement on X on Friday, Microsoft apologised for the disruption.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” the company said. It added that it was “seeing broad recovery and stability across our services”.

Microsoft said the outage was “a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents”. It explained that the problem “was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change”.

“We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions,” the company said.

Microsoft said it restored services gradually and checked stability at each stage. “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” it said. The company added that it will publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete.

Reuters later reported that Microsoft said on Friday that services had fully recovered across Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other applications.

Delays can continue after a major outage is fixed, while emails that piled up during the disruption are delivered. That could explain why “receiving messages” is still one of the most reported problems among UAE Outlook users.

The outage began late on Thursday, November 12, and grew worse on Friday morning. It hit Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 apps, and disrupted businesses and government agencies around the world.