Microsoft Says 365 Outage Came From a Network Upgrade Issue as Recovery Holds

REDMOND, November 14, 2026 — Microsoft says recovery of its Microsoft 365 services is holding after a global outage that began on Thursday, and it has now given its first official account of what went wrong: a technical issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that came to light after a later network change. The company has not, however, closed the incident. In its latest update, posted at 5.55am Malaysian time on Saturday, the Microsoft 365 Status account said it was watching the remaining email backlog “to ensure all process successfully before considering the issue resolved.”

That wording matters. Microsoft has not yet declared the outage over, and its public service health page was still listing a service degradation on Saturday morning, saying users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services. Official Exchange Online incident EX1550543 and the wider Microsoft 365 advisory MO1550821 were still open as service degradation after updates at about 4.02am Malaysian time.

At 4.05am, Microsoft 365 Status said that as infrastructure stabilises, it is “still draining queued messages and rebalancing traffic”, so customers may find they can sign in and reach their accounts while email delivery and processing are still catching up. “We do not have an ETA for full recovery yet,” it said. “Service access can recover before mail flow fully normalizes.”

The company also used the night to explain the cause in broader terms. At 12.40am Malaysian time on Saturday, the main Microsoft account posted an apology, later repeated by Microsoft 365 Status at 2.05am and entered into both official incident notices. “We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services,” it said. “This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident 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.”

Microsoft said it restored services gradually, checking stability at each stage, and that it will publish a full post-incident report once its review is complete. That report is where a detailed root-cause finding would normally appear; the incident notices have not yet filled in a formal root-cause field. As reported by The Verge, senior correspondent Tom Warren has said, citing his sources, that the outage is linked to configuration changes to Azure virtual networks — the software-defined networks that connect cloud servers — but Microsoft has not confirmed that specific explanation.

LNA first reported the initial disruption and later Microsoft’s admission that early fixes were not taking as expected. On Friday evening the first clear signs of a turnaround appeared. Overnight, at 10.17pm Malaysian time, Microsoft 365 Status said email queues had been “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels”, though some users could still see intermittent access problems or delayed mail. A 48-hour email timeout window, announced earlier on Friday, remains in place. In plain terms, a timeout is how long mail servers keep retrying a message that cannot be delivered before giving up and sending it back, so mail is delayed rather than lost while the backlog clears.

According to Microsoft’s incident reports, problems with Exchange Online, the cloud service behind business email in Outlook, began at around 11.17am Eastern Time on Thursday, November 12 — 12.17am Malaysian time on Friday — followed by a broader Microsoft 365 advisory that afternoon. Because so many Microsoft 365 tools lean on Exchange, the effects reached features in SharePoint Online, Teams, Copilot and other business services. The Verge said some of its own staff have regained access to email, although messages may still arrive late. Reuters reported on Friday that the outage was easing after more than 24 hours, but that Microsoft still had no timeline for a full restoration.

What to watch next is whether Microsoft can clear the remaining email backlog and formally close EX1550543 and MO1550821, and what its post-incident report says about the network upgrade and the later change that brought the problem to the surface. Until those notices are closed, the official position is recovery under watch, not a completed fix.

Source : Microsoft 365 Status on X, 5.55am Malaysian time, November 14, 2026, and earlier updates at 4.05am, 2.05am and 10.17pm; Microsoft on X, 12.40am Malaysian time; Microsoft’s public service health page; official incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821; The Verge; and Reuters.

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