Downdetector continues to show reports following 24-hour outage: What users need to know.
Dubai: Some Outlook and Microsoft 365 users in the UAE continue to experience problems, despite Microsoft saying it has restored services following a global outage that lasted more than 24 hours.
On Saturday morning, outage tracker Downdetector UAE was still displaying an alert stating: “User reports show possible problems with Microsoft 365.”
Although the number of reports has fallen significantly from Friday’s peak, they have not disappeared entirely. Downdetector’s 24-hour chart for Microsoft Outlook showed nearly 400 reports late on Friday morning. Reports then declined sharply through the afternoon, approaching zero by Friday night. However, a slight increase began early on Saturday and continued until around 9am.
Among Outlook users, 42 per cent of complaints related to the app, 31 per cent to receiving emails and 16 per cent to login issues. For Microsoft 365, 65 per cent of reported problems concerned the app, 17 per cent involved logging in and 12 per cent related to the website.
Downdetector relies on reports submitted by users, so its figures indicate trends in reported problems rather than the exact number of people affected.
What Microsoft said
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, adding 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 brought services back online gradually, checking their stability at each stage. “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” it said. The company added that it would publish a full post-incident report after completing its review.
Reuters later reported that Microsoft had said on Friday that services had fully recovered across Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other applications.
Why some users may still have problems
Some delays can persist even after the underlying outage has been resolved, particularly as emails queued during the disruption are processed and delivered. This could help explain why problems receiving messages remain among the most commonly reported issues by Outlook users in the UAE.
What was affected
The outage began late on Thursday, November 12, and intensified on Friday morning. It affected Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications, disrupting businesses and government agencies around the world.
