Microsoft has apologised for a global outage that disrupted critical services in dozens of countries, and has attributed the disruption to a technical issue rather than to artificial intelligence. The company, which provides some of the world's most popular office software, said the failure affected a range of services used by businesses and individuals.

The disruption extended into a second day, affecting Microsoft's email, messaging and other services. The New York Times reported that the company described "encouraging" progress in its efforts to restore them, though the outage had not been fully resolved at the time of reporting.S2

Taken together, the two reports show a company working to contain a multi-day disruption while publicly ruling out AI as the cause. Further details on the root cause and the timeline for full restoration were not available in the sources.S1S2