Quote:A massive Microsoft outage that has left people around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other staples of modern office life is nearly fixed, according to the latest word from the company.

Microsoft has apologized for the outage, which could end up costing billions in lost productivity. Microsoft said the outage was caused by a “technical issue” rather than any cybersecurity breach. “The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change,” the company said.

The company reported that queues of emails waiting to be delivered are “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.”

Problems started midday Thursday on the US East Coast, and quickly spread around the globe. As many as 430 million users were reportedly affected at some point.