Microsoft says outage is fixed, but some UAE users still report issues

Dubai: Some Outlook and Microsoft 365 users in the UAE are still having problems, even though Microsoft says it has restored services after a global outage that lasted more than a day.

On Saturday morning, outage tracker Downdetector UAE was still showing an alert that read: “User reports show possible problems with Microsoft 365.”

Report numbers are far below Friday’s peak, but they have not dropped to zero. Downdetector’s 24-hour chart for Microsoft Outlook shows nearly 400 reports late on Friday morning. Reports dropped steeply in the afternoon and were close to zero by Friday night. A small rise in reports began again early on Saturday and continued until about 9am.

Among Outlook users, 42 per cent of complaints were about the app, 31 per cent about receiving messages and 16 per cent about logging in. For Microsoft 365, 65 per cent of reported problems were about the app, 17 per cent about logging in and 12 per cent about the website.

Downdetector counts reports that users submit themselves, so the figures show trends rather than the exact number of people affected.

“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.