Microsoft has said there is no indication that the nationwide ground stop ordered by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is connected to any of its services, as the company worked to restore a separate global outage that disrupted businesses, government agencies and millions of users. A company spokesperson said Microsoft has no indication that the FAA ground stop is related to the recent service disruption. The clarification came after the FAA halted all departing flights across the United States on Friday because of communications problems affecting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centres. The timing of the two events raised questions about a possible link with the Microsoft outage, which had been affecting several of the company’s widely used platforms since Thursday. Microsoft maintained that the two incidents were unrelated, and United States Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also ruled out a connection, describing them as separate issues.
The Microsoft outage hit a wide range of Microsoft 365 services, particularly those linked to Exchange Online, the company’s cloud based email and scheduling platform. Users reported problems accessing Outlook, Teams and Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, which interrupted email communication, virtual meetings and other daily workplace tasks. The disruption spread across several countries and touched businesses, financial institutions and government agencies. In the United States, the House of Representatives reported problems with its systems, while organisations in Australia, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines also faced interruptions. Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were among those affected, Singapore’s government technology agency reported email disruption, and the Supreme Court of the Philippines said some of its operations had been affected. Some organisations turned to alternative methods of communication, including fax machines, and trading and corporate reporting activities saw delays. Downdetector, which tracks user reported service disruptions, recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the peak of the outage on Thursday, with reports also coming from dozens of other countries, although Microsoft did not disclose the total number of affected users.
On the cause, Microsoft said the disruption involved servers supporting Microsoft 365 services and was linked to an issue from an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced after a later network change. The company initially found it difficult to restore normal operations, as some recovery measures did not deliver the improvements that engineers expected. In later updates, Microsoft said it was seeing signs of stabilisation and improving capacity while its teams continued to work on restoring the affected services. The company stated that the incident was not related to malicious activity, a cyber incident or artificial intelligence. It also apologised to customers, saying it was deeply sorry for the disruption caused to customers and partners, and promised to publish a full post incident report once its review is complete.
The aviation disruption developed separately in the United States, where the FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop for departing flights on Friday and described the move as a safety precaution while communications problems were examined. United States Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said FAA technicians were investigating the failure. Mullin said there was no immediate indication that the aviation disruption was deliberate, although officials had not ruled out a cyber related cause. The two events have drawn fresh attention to how much businesses and public institutions depend on interconnected digital infrastructure, and to how a technical fault in one place can quickly affect services in many countries. The FAA’s investigation into its communications failure remains separate from the work Microsoft is doing to restore its services.
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