Microsoft said Friday the loss of online consumer services, including its Outlook email, was the result of a "technical issue," not rogue AI or a malicious hack.

"This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agent," Microsoft said on its cloud status page. "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.”

The outage essentially blocked email via Outlook for the entire Thursday workday and into the evening. Miscroft said.

The tech giant also said Friday morning that consumer services, including its Outlook email are “currently recovering.” 

However, the outage appeared to be continuing through the afternoon – impacting Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web, according to the tech news outlet PC World.